Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon

Women Psychoanalysts in Australia

Geschichte

Ivy Bennett
Maida Hall
Maria Teresa Savio Hooke
Clara Lazar-Geroe
Janet Nield
Vera Roboz
Silvia Rodriguez
Rose Rothfield
María-Inés Rotmiler de Zentner

Ivy Bennett (1919-2011)

Ivy Bennett was born in Wagin, Western Australia, the daughter of Ernest and Catherine Bennett. She and her five siblings grew up on a sheep farm in Lake Grace. In 1939 she took a BA degree in modern literature and subsequently studied clinical psychology at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in Perth, graduating with an MA in 1943. From 1942 to 1945 she taught at Hugh Fowler's UWA Department of Psychology.
With a British Council scholarship she travelled to England in 1946, enrolling for a PhD with Cyril Burt at University College London Psychology Department and graduating in 1951. At the same time, from 1947 to 1951, she trained with Anna Freud at the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and became an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) in 1951. Her PhD thesis dealt with the research of the development of neurotic and delinquent children, started together with Kate Friedländer at the West Sussex Child Guidance Clinic. Friedländer's untimely death in 1949 left Ivy Bennett to continue the project alone. Based on Friedländer's psychoanalytic theory of juvenile delinquency, she developed an intensive study, which was published in 1960 under the title Delinquent and Neurotic Children.
In 1952 Ivy Bennett returned to Australia. She was a founding member of the Australian Society of Psychoanalysts and established a psychoanalytic private practice in Perth in 1953. In 1958 she travelled once again to England for further training and was awarded full membership of the BPAS in 1962. In the same year she married Eric H. Gwynne-Thomas (1917-2008), an English-born educational scientist. Three years later she moved with him and their daughter Elizabeth to Kansas, where her husband became Professor of Education at the University of Missouri - Kansas City (UMKC).
Ivy Bennett Gwynne-Thomas became a member of the Topeka Psychoanalytic Society, and in 1965 she was a founding member of the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Society. From 1968 to 1980 she taught psychiatry at the UMKC Medical School. Retired since 1993, she died from leukaemia at the age of 92. (Top of the article)



Maida Hall (1911-1957)

Maida Elsie Wilhelmina Buxton Hall was born in Sydney, the eldest daughter of Thomas George Hall, a dental surgeon, and Elsie Alice Hall. Maida Hall graduated in medicine at the University of Sydney in 1935. Subsequently, she did her residency at the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington, New South Wales, and set up a private practice in Sydney. In 1937 she married Litster Anderson Wark (1970-1974). Their daughter Elspeth Alice was born in 1943, a second daughter in 1948. In 1952, the marriage ended in divorce. A year later she married Thomas Daley-Hall.
In the early 1950s, Maida Hall began an analysis with Andrew Petö, a psychoanalyst emigrated from Hungary, who became her training analyst. She then went for a year to London, had further analysis from a Kleinian there, and achieved full membership of the British Psychoanalytical Society. In 1956, she returned to Australia. As a training analyst at the Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis, she was supposed to take over the role from Andrew Petö, who moved to the USA in 1956. However, she was already too ill to perform this role. On October 1957, Maida Hall died from intestinal cancer.
Maida Hall was the first Australian psychiatrist to work with a Kleinian orientation. One of her analysands was the Kleinian Reg Martin, who later became president of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. (Top of the article)



Maria Teresa Hooke née Savio

Maria Teresa Savio Hooke was born in Italy and graduated in languages, literatures and psychology at the University of Turin. She worked there for ten years as a child psychotherapist at the Child Psychiatry Department and as a part of the teaching staff. She then went to London for further training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic.
In London she married in 1976 the Australian John Hooke (1933-2018), a physics engineer, businessman and an advocate for nanotechnology. They had two sons, John Maximilian and Paolo. In the same year she moved with her husband to Sydney, where she completed her psychoanalytic training with the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APAS). She became a member of the APAS and a training and supervising analyst at the Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis. From 2002 to 2005 she was Vice President and from 2005 to 2008 President of the APAS.
Maria Teresa Savio Hooke is particularly interested in the application of psychoanalysis to the solution of social problems, in psychoanalytic training and the spreading of psychoanalysis in new countries outside of Europe and North America. She is past chair and now advisor of ING, the IPA's International New Groups Committee, and from 2008 to 2013 she was a member of the IPA China Committee and chair of Outreach and communication. From 2007 to 2013 she was co-chair for Europe of the IPA Committee on Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Ageing of Patients and Analysts.
In 2009 Maria Teresa Hooke received the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity and in 2016 the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for her services to psychoanalysis. (Top of the article)



Clara Lazar-Geroe (1900-1980)

Klara Lázár was born in Pápa in Hungary, the daughter of the Jewish Hungarian wholesale grocer Adolf Adam Lázár and his wife Ilona née Lusztig. After completing her secondary schooling at a Calvinist college, she studied medicine. She graduated in 1924 at the University of Pécs and specialised in psychiatry. In 1927 she married Vilmos (William) Gerö (1898-1983), with whom she had her son George.
Impressed by the work of Sándor Ferenczi, Klara Lázár commenced psychoanalytic training in 1925 in Budapest. She underwent a three-year training analysis with Michael Balint and was accepted for membership by the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society in 1931 and, in 1938, as a registered training analyst. Working with Alice Balint in a children's clinic, she became increasingly interested in child analysis. Together with Margit Dubovitz, she directed the educational counselling of the psychoanalytic polyclinic of the MPE.
From 1932 to 1939, Klara Lázár-Gerö practised privately in Budapest until the anti-Semitic laws of the Horthy regime forced her into exile. She emigrated to Australia, after Ernest Jones, the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), had appointed her - on the advice of Michael Balint - as training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and had authorised her to function in Melbourne as a branch of the British Society.
In 1940 Clara Lazar Geroe and her family arrived in Melbourne, where she worked, from 1941 on, as the only training analyst at the new Institute of Psychoanalysis for the next twenty years. (Fig.: Clara and Vilmos Geroe in the 1940s) Due to this fact the beginnings of psychoanalysis in Australia were marked by the Budapest School of Sándor Ferenczi. Unlike Maida Hall, Clara Geroe was resistant to Melanie Klein's positions, most likely because of her friendship with Anna Freud. Along with the Australian analyst Roy Winn, the Hungarian analyst Endre (Andrew) Petö and others, Clara Lazar-Geroe formed the Australian Society of Psychoanalysts in 1952 as a branch of the BPAS. It would become independent in 1967, and by 1973 the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APAS) was ratified as a full member of the IPA.
Clara Geroe was president of the APAS for several years. She organised seminars for candidates in training, psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors and educators, as well as for probation officers, teachers, kindergarten teachers and parents. Clara Geroe ran a polyclinic and established a child guidance clinic at the Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis. She lectured in psychology at the University of Melbourne, served as honorary psychoanalyst to the Royal Melbourne Hospital and was a co-founder of the College of Psychiatrists. (Top of the article)



Janet Nield née Plant (1911-1992)

Janet Blake Nield, born in Rutherglen, Victoria, was one of the first psychoanalysts trained in Australia. She graduated in history at the University of Melbourne in 1934 and completed an MA in 1936 and a Diploma of Education in 1939.
In 1935 Janet Plant met Joseph Clive Nield (1908-1977), a master at Geelong Grammar School like her. They married in 1936 and had an only son, Lawrence. Sharing a commitment to child-focused education, Janet and Clive Nield departed in 1938 for a nine-month tour to study progressive educational methods and institutions in Europe, England, Canada and the United States. Among other things, they spent time at Alexander S. Neill's free Summerhill School. It became the model for their own progressive Koornong School, which they set up in Warrandyte, near Melbourne, in 1939. Supported by the psychoanalyst Clara Lazar Geroe, who trained the educators, the experimental Koornong School made use of the ideas embedded in psychoanalysis.
Between 1941 and 1946 Janet Nield commenced training analysis with Clara Lazar at the newly established Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis. Following the closure of Koornong School in 1947 she and her husband moved to Sydney. In 1953 Janet Nield was appointed as an honorary psychotherapist at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, a position she held until 1971. She continued her training analysis with Andrew Petö, director of the Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis founded in 1951. Janet Nield qualified as an analyst in 1962 and was granted membership of the British Psychoanalytical Society that same year. Since the late 1960s, she served as a training analyst at the Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis. By teaching and supervising psychiatrists and other therapists at the Hospital for Children, she made a crucial contribution to the recognition of psychoanalysis.
Following her husband's death in 1977, Janet Nield decided to move to Adelaide to assist in the development of the new Adelaide Institute of Psychoanalysis, which was launched in 1979. She worked as a training and supervising analyst at the institute until the mid-1980s. Then she returned to Sydney, where she died in her home in Balmain in 1992. (Top of the article)



Vera Roboz née Groák (1912-1989)

Born in Hungary, Vera Roboz-Groák was initially trained in orthopedagogy. Like her future husband, the paediatrician Pál (Paul) Roboz (1900-1984), she was a disciple and colleague of Leopold Szondi. Szondi, the founder of fate analysis and creator of the Szondi test, lectured and researched in Budapest until his deportation and emigration in 1944.
After the end of World War II, many of Szondi's adherents came into leading positions, including Vera Roboz. She was until 1956 professor of the Remedial Teacher's Training College in Budapest, where she headed the faculty of criminal psychology. During her time in Budapest she received her psychoanalytic training, her training analyst was presumably Hanns Sachs. She was not a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society.
After the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, Vera and Pál Roboz emigrated to Australia and settled in Melbourne in 1957. Vera Roboz was a member of the Australian Society of Psychoanalysts, which was affiliated with the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) and became an independent Australian Study Group in 1967. Her associate membership of the BPAS was delayed for five years until 1962, although she was active in analytic practice and the affairs of the Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis all that time. In 1968 she was admitted to full membership. Along with Clara Geroe she was an initial member of the Training Committee in Australia, which became responsible for psychoanalytic training in Australia. (Top of the article)



Silvia Rodriguez (*1945)

Argentine-born and educated, Silvia Alicia Rodriguez first came into contact with psychoanalysis at the age of fifteen: when her parents separated, reading Sigmund Freud was a refuge for her. She was originally oscillating between medicine and psychology, but then decided to pursue psychology and finished studying in 1968. Silvia Rodriguez and her husband, Leonardo Rodriguez, were trained in Lacanian psychoanalysis in Argentina, at a time when there was a close relationship between psychoanalysis and the New Left.
When General Videla took power over Argentina in a military coup in 1976, Silvia and Leonardo Rodriguez, like many other Argentine psychoanalysts, left their country. They emigrated to Australia and arrived in Melbourne in 1977. Silvia Rodriguez's first job was at the Austin Hospital in child psychiatry. She underwent a further analysis with Bill Blomfield of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. She worked in the Psychiatric Department at the Royal Children's Hospital until 1986 as a psychologist, before she could start her psychoanalytic practice in Melbourne.
Silvia Rodriguez was a co-founder of the Australian Journal of Psychotherapy in 1982 and of the Lacanian Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis (ACP) in 1986. She was a president of the ACP from 2013 to 2017 and teaches psychoanalysis at the ACP Institute for Training and at the Department of Psychological Medicine at Monash University in Melbourne. In a series of articles Silvia Rodriguez has explored various aspects of Lacanian thought, partly in collaboration with her husband. (Top of the article)



Rose Rothfield (1922-2019)

The physician Rose Rothfield belonged to the first generation of Australian psychoanalysts who were trained by Clara Lazar-Geroe. From 1951 on she taught at the Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis and was a co-founder of the Australian Society of Psychoanalysts as a branch of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) in 1952. It would become independent as an IPA study group in 1967. In 1956 Rose Rothfield was admitted as an associate member of the BPAS.
She was interested in the ideas of Melanie Klein and spent in the 1960s several years in London, where she underwent a second analysis with the Kleinian Herbert Rosenfeld. After her return to Melbourne she was in 1968 appointed training analyst of the Australian Study Group, since 1971 Australian Psychoanalytical Society (APAS) and a component society of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1973. She was a member of the Victorian Association of Psychotherapists and - along with Clara Geroe and Vera Roboz - an initial member of the Training Committee in Australia.



María-Inés Rotmiler de Zentner

The Lacanian analyst María-Inés Rotmiler de Zentner was born in Argentina as the daughter of European immigrants. She studied psychology at the National University of Buenos Aires and was trained in Buenos Aires in classical Freudian psychoanalysis at the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina. Subsequently she underwent analysis with Oscar Masotta, a Lacanian analyst who had founded in 1974 the Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires.
In 1977 María-Inés Rotmiler de Zentner and her husband, the psychoanalyst Oscar Zentner, left Argentina, which was afflicted with Videla's terror, and emigrated to Australia. They established themselves in Melbourne and founded in 1977 the Lacanian-oriented Freudian School of Melbourne. Oscar Zentner and María Inés Rotmiler de Zentner assumed responsibility for the preparation and editorship of the Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne since its inception in 1979. Numerous essays of Rotmiler de Zentner had been published there.
María-Inés Rotmiler de Zentner worked for many years in the Department of Psychiatry of the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, and for the Postgraduate Child Psychiatry Training Programme of Victoria. Her writings include works on suicide, anorexia nervosa, desire and discourse, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s pseudonym, and the question of time in the psychoanalytic treatment. In 1992, she resigned as a member of The Freudian School of Melbourne and currently works in private practice in South Yarra, Melbourne. She is a Consultant Psychoanalyst in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Austin Hospital, and a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Psychological Medicine, Monash University. (Top of the article)



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