I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Welcome
“Live the questions now.” Rainer Maria Rilke
Thank you for visiting this page. I’m Julia, and I work as a psychodynamic psychotherapist, relationship counsellor, and clinical supervisor. I’ve been in private practice in the City of London and in south-west London for the past three years; for the decade before that, I worked as a specialist psychotherapist for working age adults in the NHS (where I’ve also run staff groups).
This is where you will find the posts on my London-based blog, which I update constantly through the week, almost as a stream of consciousness. It reflects my interests, including psychotherapy, and my weekly experience outside – though not divorced from – my work. It’s a contemporary version of the commonplace book – one where the thoughts, responses, and comments of others are welcome.
“a rococo bauble…delicious arabesques of protocol.”
From A Nervous Splendor (1979), by Frederic Morton:
“If his subjects’ electrical frivolities frustrated the Crown Prince, so did their attitude toward the telephone. Rudolf admired the telephone’s use abroad, not least its facilitation of stock-market-business between widely separated cities. Particularly in America this let more and more of the common people participate in transactions heretofore limited to millionaires.
In Rudolf’s own country, though, the telephone could not seem to become a democratic utility. Austrians treated it like a rococo bauble. This summer long-distance service began between Vienna and the suburb of Baden near Mayerling. Calls were limited to ten minutes, of which at least six were taken up by delicious arabesques of protocol.
“Fräulein Operator in Baden?” said Fräulein Operator in Vienna.
“Might I have the honor to wish you a good morning? It is my privilege to establish a connection on behalf of His Excellency, the Privy Councillor Alfons Baron von Wieck, who presents his compliments. His Excellency would be grateful for the pleasure of conversing with …””
From the Smallweed column of The Guardian of Sat 4 Aug 2001:
“It seemed a safe bet that it would not be long before someone came up with Freud’s telephone number and sure enough someone has. It was HAM (for Hampstead) 2002. Sigmund, you may remember from this column last week, when 43 was allotted the Vienna telephone number 14362. Aha! he said to himself (I paraphrase, but not much). The number 43 is my present age. So the 62 which follows must be the age at which I am doomed to die. He was troubled enough to write to Jung about it. Just as well he wasn’t living in Hampstead at 20. He might have feared dying at two.”
Paul Roazen wrote in the Autumn 1978 issue of VQR:
“In their convictions Orwell and Freud had far more in common than one might suppose. Both were superlative rationalists who felt their intelligence oppressed by the weight of human stupidity. Religious belief seemed to them a particularly noxious species of nonsense. Politically, Orwell and Freud shared a suspicion of American power. Although Orwell made much more of his concern at the dangers inherent in machines, in his daily life Freud rarely relied on the use of the telephone; for both of them letter-writing was an art as well as a necessity. Although Freud was far older, born in 1856 instead of 1903, each came to feel that World War I marked a watershed after which the universe was barer and more dilapidated.”
John Dyer posted at j.hn on November 28, 2008:
“Freud had some great observations about how the technology of his day (wired telephones and railroads) were affecting his world. This quote summarizes his feelings:
“If there had been no railway to conquer distance, my child would never have left town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice.”
I love how Freud encapsulates one of today’s most fascinating phenomena: we create technology to help solve problems created by technology. This seems to beautifully capture the human condition.
(Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961, p. 38.)”
From A Nervous Splendor (1979), by Frederic Morton:
“”Fräulein Operator in Vienna?” Fräulein Operator in Baden said.
“The party whom I have the honor to serve at this end of the wire, University Professor Dr. Dr. Alois Zechner,* would like to convey to you and to your party a hand kiss for the courtesy of awaiting the completion of this connection. Fräulein Operator, if it is still convenient for His Excellency the Privy Councillor Baron von Wieck to entertain the connection, Herr Professor Dr. Dr.
Zechner would be only too deeply pleased…”
The rococo kept rolling over the telephone during the warm months of 1888. Not everybody shared the Crown Prince’s impatience over it. Why hurry? This new season ahead, this newfangled autumn wasn’t here yet. In fact, right now fall seemed further off than ever. The rain stopped, the sun shone, and July flowed so radiantly into August that one might think that August would, with the same ease, flow back into July. One floated through a summer of reprieve.
It was during this reprieve that Dr. Freud added a day to his Alpine weekends with his family at Maria-Schutz. He picked mushrooms, climbed past fragrant dwarf larches to the Schneeberg peak, enjoyed the view of the Vienna Woods, and for once let the Grub Street deadlines for that medical dictionary go hang…
* (sic) In Austria, to this day, in addressing an academician, each of his doctorates is separately mentioned.”
“The text, ‘Verbe égal au Très-Haut’ (‘Word, one with the Highest’), is a paraphrase of a Latin hymn by the French playwright Jean Racine.”
See YEAR OF WONDER: Classical Music for Every Day (2017), by Clemency Burton-Hill: 15th May entry.
“She had been awakened by the alarm of fire…
…Her poor, dear master had certainly been murdered. Had he any enemies? Well, every man had enemies, but Mr. Oldacre kept himself very much to himself, and only met people in the way of business. She had seen the buttons, and was sure that they belonged to the clothes which he had worn last night. The wood-pile was very dry, for it had not rained for a month. It burned like tinder, and by the time she reached the spot nothing could be seen but flames. She and all the firemen smelled the burned flesh from inside it. She knew nothing of the papers, nor of Mr. Oldacre’s private affairs…”
(From The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
CHAPTER II: “THE ADVENTURE OF THE NORWOOD BUILDER”)
“Conan Doyle lived in South Norwood from 1891 to 1894, and so was very familiar with the area. There is however a good deal of ambiguity as to specific settings within the story. The Norwood where Oldacre lives for instance is called “Lower Norwood”, which until around 1885 would have been the term used for what is now West Norwood. The story however was penned some time after this date, and Oldacre is described as living in “Deep Dene House, at the Sydenham end of the road of that name”. South Norwood itself might be a logical candidate for Lower Norwood, however the only discernible connection between the story and South Norwood is that Norwood Junction railway station is used by Oldacre. McFarlane spends the night in The Anerley Arms, a pub that still exists and which has a derelict upper floor (no more overnight guests). It is now one of the Samuel Smith’s family of pubs and celebrates its connection with Sherlock Holmes…
…(see main image) West Norwood railway station was opened as Lower Norwood on 1 December 1856, as part of the West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway. It was renamed on 1 January 1886 by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LBSCR), owing to the objections of an influx of new residents who objected to the “lower” prefix; they preferred the locale to be described instead as West Norwood.” (Wikipedia)
On 18th December 1921 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle addressed the congregation of Anerley Congregational Church…
From the Historic England entry:
“The Gothic revival style former fire station was probably designed by the architect Robert Pearsall at the Metropolitan Board of Works Architect’s Department and was built in 1881. It remains a rare example of a fire station built for horse-drawn tenders which still has the look-out tower and original doors in place. Its history as a fire station was short however, as motorised fire appliances, introduced in the early 20th century were too big for its doors, which could not be practicably extended, and the fire station ceased to function as such in 1917. Between 1917 and 1967, the building was used mainly as a church hall for the neighbouring St Luke’s Church.
The original design for the conversion to a theatre was by Owen Luder (later to become President of the Royal Institute of British Architects on two occasions). The original theatre was traditional proscenium arch in style, with a fly loft requiring the removal of a floor in part of the first storey. The auditorium had raked seating with a capacity of just under 100. The space was known as Bell Theatre.
In February 1975 a small studio theatre was added in a single storey extension at the South end of the building for “productions which would not fit into the usual theatre pattern.” This space was known as Prompt Corner.
Following refurbishment, the theatre now has one large theatre space and several rooms which are available to hire, when not in use by the community group.”
From the Historic England entry:
“Fire station with flats above. Built 1914-15 by London County Council Architects’ Department.
The original West Norwood fire station (originally named Norwood) was built 1881-2 at No 2a Norwood High Street (qv), now the South London Theatre. Drawings entitled ‘LCC West Norwood FBS’ show the 1914-15 building much as it is today, with room for three appliances, watch room, reading room, wash house and services at ground floor, and three flats (one-, two- and three- bedroom at each floor) to each of the floors above.
HISTORY: Fire services in London emerged principally from the need for insurance providers to limit their losses through damage to property in the period after the Great Fire of 1666. Initially, each insurer maintained a separate brigade that only served subscribers until the foundation of an integrated service in 1833, funded by City businesses. In 1866, following an Act of Parliament of the previous year, the first publicly-funded authority charged with saving lives and protecting buildings from fire was founded: the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, initially part of the Metropolitan Board of Works.
The earliest MFB fire stations were generally plain brick and few pre-1880 examples survive. In 1880s under the MFB architect Robert Pearsall, fire stations acquired a true architectural identity, most notably in the rich Gothic style typical of Victorian municipal buildings such as Bishopsgate.
It was the building boom of the 1890s-1900s however that was to transform fire station architecture and give the Brigade some of its most characterful buildings. In 1889, the fire brigade passed to the newly-formed London County Council, and from 1896 new stations were designed by a group of architects led by Owen Fleming and Charles Canning Winmill, both formerly of the LCC Housing Department, who brought the highly-experimental methods which had evolved for designing new social housing to the Fire Brigade Division (as the department was called from 1899), and drew on a huge variety of influences to create unique and commanding stations, each built to a bespoke design and plan. This exciting period in fire station design continued to the outbreak of WWI, although there was some standardisation of design in the period.”
Postbox topper, George Street, Richmond upon Thames
“‘When our little Mathilde-baby chuckles, we think it the most beautiful thing that could happen to us.’”
Mathilde Freud (1887–1978), named after Josef Breuer’s wife, was the eldest of Sigmund and Martha Freud’s six children. She married Robert Höllischer (1875–1959); they had no children. In 1938 Mathilde and her husband, her parents, three brothers and two sisters moved to England after Hitler annexed Austria. Mathilde Höllischer opened ‘Robell’, a women’s fashion store on Baker Street. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403614146131
From A Nervous Splendor (1979), by Frederic Morton:
“…the Freuds had been entitled to think that their investment in a good address would pay off. Maria Theresenstrasse 8 lay right by the Ringstrasse, a neighborhood of arrived doctors and distinguished professionals. Anton Bruckner, for example, lived opposite at Hessgasse 7 and could afford the rent, having only himself to support on his joint salaries as instructor at the Conservatory and organist at the Palace Chapel. But if the old musician ever troubled to look down from his fourth-floor clutter to the young doctor’s orderly household on the second floor across the street, he would have seen precious few patients in the waiting room.
Greatness, or at least great success, hovered somewhere around the corner, but it did not enter here. Freud was as stymied as anyone else in Vienna. At the start of his career he had tried a cocaine cure on depressives — disastrously. Some patients became addicted. And though young Dr. Arthur Schnitzler — as it happened — published an article praising Freud’s cocaine experiments, the medical establishment turned against him. Now he was using bath cures, rest cures, electrotherapy and, finally, hypnosis in partnership with Josef Breuer.
Breuer, however, was a leading physician in town, doctor to the city’s most distinguished neurotics, summer resident of a spacious house on the Gmundner Lake. Freud, younger and much less deft with patients, spent the first July weekend of 1888 in a little pension which made do as a summer resort for his family. Because of his train phobia during those years the doctor took the horse coach to the village of Maria-Schutz in the Semmering Alps, just beyond the Vienna Woods, but only twenty miles from Mayerling. He arrived drenched by the same rain as Rudolf’s hunting lodge, brushed at by the same breeze that hissed through the twigs of the black fir. Among the rootwork of these pines grew large tangy mushrooms, the Herrenpilze which Freud liked to eat and loved to hunt during damp weather. But when could he find time? His mind was already swarming with great surmises. They all went against the dogma of the University Psychiatric Clinic. Freud was kept from an appointment there by his own ideas, though he had little leisure to explore them that summer. In the city he spent himself with his nerve-doctor chores. On his country weekends he did medical hackwork. Right now, in July 1888, he was grinding out anonymous articles for Villaret’s Medical Dictionary together with a translation of a French alienist’s treatise. He had (as he confessed later) the temperament of “a great adventurer, a conquistador, a Pizarro.” Yet that summer he maintained a drudge’s resignation and pretended to an iron fatalism.
“Life goes on tolerably well here,” he wrote to his most intimate friend, Wilhelm Fliess. “We live in constantly increasing unassumingness. When our little Mathilde-baby chuckles, we think it the most beautiful thing that could happen to us. Otherwise we are not very ambitious. … My practice grew a little in the winter and spring and is now dropping off again, but it just keeps us alive. Such time and opportunity as there has been for work has gone on… matters not worthy of note. … In short, life goes on, and life is known to be very difficult and very complicated, and, as we say in Vienna, many roads lead to the Central Cemetery.” Freud’s mood may have been colored by the inclemency of that early summer of 1888…”
“outstandingly good music that still has to fight to be heard.”
See YEAR OF WONDER: Classical Music for Every Day (2017), by Clemency Burton-Hill: 14th May entry.
No. 3 in E flat major: Andante soave by Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847)
“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.”*
*from Brideshead Revisited (1945), by Evelyn Waugh.
From Nancy Mitford (1985), by Selina Hastings:
“…Evelyn encouraged her not to give up. ‘It is good news that you may take up the pen again. Please give the results to Chapman & Hall. They love losing money and I will get you a substantial over advance.’
He himself had just finished Brideshead Revisited, which he had sent Nancy to read in proof. ‘A great English classic in my humble opinion,’ she told him. ‘Oh how I shld like to chat about it, there are one or 2 things I long to know. Are you, or not, on Lady Marchmain’s side. I can’t make out … One dreadful error. Diamond clips were only invented about 1930 you wore a diamond arrow in your cloche. It’s the only one, which I call good – the only one I spotted at least.’ When it came out in May 1945 he asked her to report back on its reception. Colonel, she was able to tell him, had telephoned from Paris to say that ‘people are giving luncheon parties to discuss the book & the Windsors have given it to everyone for Xmas. Rather low-brow circles I fear but still!’ And she herself had ‘a great deal to say – 2 air letters (1/-, agony) if necessary & the whole evening before me… I am answering your letter about Brideshead. I quite see how the person who tells is dim but then would Julia & her brother & her sister all be in love with him if he was? Well love is like that & one never can tell. What I can’t understand is about God. Now I believe in God & I talk to him a very great deal & often tell him jokes but the God I believe in simply hates fools more than anything & he also likes people to be happy & people who love each other to live together – so long as nobody else’s life is upset (& then he’s not sure). Now I see that I am absolutely religious. I also see this because what is a red rag to a bull to several people about your book is the subtle clever Catholic propaganda & I hardly noticed there was any which shows I am immune from it Now about what people think:
Raymond: Great English classic
Cyril: Brilliant where the narrative is straightforward. Doesn’t care for the “purple passages” ie death bed of Lord M. thinks you go too much to White’s. But found it impossible to put down (no wonder)
Osbert: Jealous – doesn’t like talking about it ‘I’m devoted to Evelyn – are you?’
Maurice: showing off to Cyril about how you don’t always hit the right word or some nonsense but obviously much impressed & thinks the Oxford part perfect.
SW7 (European royal quarter) Heaven darling
Diana Abdy: like me & Raymond, no fault to find
Lady Chetwode: Terribly dangerous propaganda Brilliant
General view: It is the Lygon family. Too much Catholic stuff.’”
“Nowhere was it easier to be a European,” wrote Stefan Zweig,..
…that great elegist of Viennese cosmopolitanism, who gave Freud’s eulogy and, less than three years later, in 1942, took his own life, unable to watch as his “spiritual homeland” destroyed itself.”
Stephen Heyman wrote in the New York Times of Aug. 29, 2014:
“…Freud loved vacations, and referred to his annual quest to find the right warm-weather retreat as the “Sommerproblem.” For one thing, vacation offered a chance to leave the city that he supposedly detested. “I hate Vienna,” he wrote, “and, just the contrary of the giant Antaeus, I draw fresh strength whenever I remove my feet from the soil of the city which is my home.”
But Freud did not always need to journey far. Vienna is both a city and a province of Austria, and Zweig wrote about how liminal that division can seem, how it’s hard to notice where nature ends and the city begins. Within a few minutes’ taxi ride, you can be up in the hills, surrounded by woods, valleys, vineyards. One of the loveliest of these outlying areas is Himmel — literally “heaven” — in Vienna’s 19th district. It’s here that Freud summered in 1895 and had the most famous dream in the history of psychology.
The dream itself is complicated. It involved Freud trying to absolve himself for the mishandling of a patient named Irma…
[“…However, the dream presents a further enigma: whose desire does it manifest? Recent commentaries clearly establish that the true motivation behind the dream was Freud’s desire to absolve Fliess, his close friend and collaborator, of responsibility and guilt. It was Fliess who botched Irma’s nose operation, and the dream’s desire is not to exculpate Freud himself, but his friend, who was, at this point, Freud’s ‘subject supposed to know’, the object of his transference. The dream dramatises his wish to show that Fliess wasn’t responsible for the medical failure, that he wasn’t lacking in knowledge. The dream does manifest Freud’s desire – but only insofar as his desire is already the Other’s (Fliess’s) desire…” (Slavoj Žižek, now international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, and the author of Absolute Recoil and Trouble in Paradise.)]
…But his analysis of it, and the resulting conclusion — that dreams are wish fulfillments — proved revolutionary. Freud was staying at the Schloss Bellevue, a spa hotel, when he had the dream and when he returned there, a few years later, he wrote to his friend, “Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on this building, inscribed with the words, ‘In this building on July 24 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud’? At this moment I see little prospect of it.”
Schloss Bellevue has long since disappeared, but a stele memorializing the spot has been placed in a green meadow across from where the hotel stood. Freud described the hotel as paradise: “Life at Bellevue is most pleasant for everyone; the scent of acacias and jasmine now follow lilac and laburnum, the dog roses are blossoming and all this happens, as I can observe, rather suddenly.”…”
“chamber music that creates a mood of exchange and dialogue between autonomous musical voices.”
See YEAR OF WONDER: Classical Music for Every Day (2017), by Clemency Burton-Hill: 13th May entry.
“The common stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus…
…The spore mass typically smells of carrion or dung, and attracts flies, beetles and other insects to help disperse the spores. Although there is great diversity in body structure shape among the various genera, all species in the Phallaceae begin their development as oval or round structures known as “eggs”. The appearance of Phallaceae is often sudden, as gleba can erupt from the underground egg and burst open within an hour.” (Wikipedia)
From Bitch: What does it mean to be female? (2022), by Lucy Cooke:
“…In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, (Darwin) insisted that the creative exuberance of sexual selection didn’t act on genitalia. He considered sex organs to be primary sexual characteristics – survival essentials and therefore under the utilitarian guidance of natural selection alone. Sexual selection only acted on secondary sexual characteristics – unessential frivolities such as bright plumage or unwieldy antlers; the sexual dimorphisms involved in either male-male competition or female choice.
As a consequence there was no need for pudendum to rear its head in the pages of his book on sexual selection. This must have pleased his daughter Henrietta, who edited his work and, if her opinion on phallic-shaped fungi is anything to go by, readily wielded her red pen when faced with anything too racy. In later life, this Victorian matriarch was said to have spearheaded a campaign to rid the English countryside of the obscenely shaped stinkhorn mushroom – Phallus impudicus – because of the effect that seeing it might have on female sensibilities…”
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/unpublished-journal-offers-new-take-on-darwins-daughter
From Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952), by Gwen Raverat:
“…Aunt Etty was my father’s elder sister Henrietta; and she had married Uncle Richard Litchfield, who worked on the legal side of the Ecclesiastical Commission (and was a founder of the Working Men’s College). The Darwin brothers were always inclined to laugh at him; indeed there still survives the unkind saying of one of them, that ‘Little Richards have long ears’. And, of course, they sometimes laughed at Aunt Etty, too! But I liked him very much, because he talked to me as if I were quite grown-up…
…She once said to me, about the Roman occupation of Britain—in her most downright tone: ‘Don’t tell me‘ (I wasn’t telling her), ‘that all those Roman soldiers lived all that time in England and didn’t leave a lot of Roman babies behind them. And a very good thing, too, I dare say.’…
…Down, my grandmother’s house, had a different flavour, much cooler and barer, less of the earth, less comfortable: a fresco in pale clear colours, a simpler, larger pattern. Aunt Etty was generally at Down when we went there, but she was only an incident there, though an important one, bringing a breath of her own warm atmosphere with her.
When Uncle Richard died Aunt Etty moved to a house near Gomshall in Surrey; and there she transformed a very ordinary villa into the same Earthly Paradise we had known in London; only now there was a garden and a wood to replace the mysterious charm of the old Kensington Square house, where Esmond’s mistress and the lovely Beatrix might have lived.
The journey to Burrow’s Hill was always a happy one…
…This little wood was also the scene of a form of sport, of which Aunt Etty can claim to be the inventor; and which certainly deserves to be more widely known. In our native woods there grows a kind of toadstool, called in the vernacular The Stinkhorn, though in Latin it bears a grosser name. The name is justified, for the fungus can be hunted by the scent alone; and this was Aunt Etty’s great invention. Armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and gloves, she would sniff her way round the wood, pausing here and there, her nostrils twitching, when she caught a whiff of her prey; then at last, with a deadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim, and poke his putrid carcase into her basket. At the end of the day’s sport, the catch was brought back and burnt in the deepest secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids. Perhaps now that there are no maids, this part of the ritual does not matter so much. Anyhow, it was the chase and not the morality which appealed to Aunt Etty. She used to excuse her ardour by saying: ‘Some day there will be no more stinkhorns left in the wood,’ but she would have been dreadfully disappointed if that had happened. How is it that this exhilarating and wholesome sport is so little known? There must be many owners of fine preserves of stinkhorns, who make no use of their privileges at all…”
Julia Upton 