ON DISLIKING WRITINGbjp_1167 156..160

Ann Scott

abstract In this contribution I describe Isabel’s approach to editing her papers forpublication. I consider the ‘unanxiety’ that allowed for a constructive relationship toher work on her papers, and coexisted with her well-known dislike of writing. I go onto consider possible reasons for the dislike, including Isabel’s longstanding preoccu-pation with the issue of how to translate the language of psychoanalysis into termsthat could be meaningful to the organizations she was working with. I suggest thatIsabel felt that the face-to-face encounter was needed to achieve this, and illustratethis with an example from a piece of consultancy at the Cassel Hospital that sheundertook, which I observed. It is hoped that work on her literary archive, justbeginning, will shed further light on these issues.

Key words: Isabel Menzies Lyth, unanxiety, organizational change, consultancy,literary archive

I first met Isabel in her 60s, 25 years ago, when she began work on collectingher papers for publication by Free Association Books, where I worked as aneditor.1 She was then at the height of her powers and cut an impressive figure– she was indeed formidable, as has often been said about her, and as AnnaMotz has said in her contribution to the conference. In conversation with me,once, she referred to ‘my duchessy way’, and I did see the imperious side ofher. At the same time, she was personally unassuming. She was extremelyinterested in everyone around her; it was striking and endearing, in someoneso eminent. I remember this quality well, as her editor in the 1980s, and thenas a friend. Shortly after her death I wrote that a tireless devotion to life anddevelopment characterized Isabel (Scott, 2008b, p. 522); it was something ofa paradox, given her personal reserve.

She was modest. Her preface to Containing Anxiety in Institutions beginsas follows: ‘It would not, I think, have occurred to me that my papers wereworth collecting . . . it was something of a surprise to me that there were somany papers that they should be selected and not merely collected’(Menzies Lyth, 1988, p. vii).Working with her, there was another quality thatI was aware of: the absence of anxiety. When asked about her qualities as asupervisor, she said: ‘I think I am fairly unanxious and not therefore likely toclamp down on somebody who is doing something different from what I

ann scott is a Member of the British Association of Psychotherapists, Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Psychotherapy, and literary executor of Isabel MenziesLyth. She is the author of Real Events Revisited: Fantasy, Memory, Psychoanalysis andis formerly Principal Lecturer, School of Integrated Health, University of Westmin-ster. Address for correspondence: [annscottbjp@aol.com]

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would do’ (Menzies Lyth, 1988, p. 36). I remember how struck I was by theword ‘unanxious’. It seemed to me to be a distinctive attribute of its own; itwas not a qualification of the anxious. I think it was this unanxiety thatallowed for a constructive relationship to her work on her papers. She wasimpeccable and diligent in their preparation, meticulous about deadlines,and was a fluent, concise writer.2

But let me come now to her dislike of writing. As is well known, she madeher dislike of writing known in the introductions to her books, choosing tomention it in the Prefaces to both volumes of her papers.

I have had all my life an aversion to writing. I have written only when someoneor something put pressure on me to write . . . I can honestly claim that I havenever spontaneously written a paper in my life . . . Lest this sounds too nega-tive, I sometimes do enjoy writing once I have started and am even grateful tothe people who have put on the pressure. (Menzies Lyth, 1988, p. viii)

This sting in her tail is followed by a reflective comment about a skew inher publications:

This aversion may partly explain why I have done much less writing on purelypsychoanalytic topics . . . One is less likely . . . to experience pressure from col-leagues to publish than when one is working in a close group or in a projectteam. Patients do not usually press one to publish. I have some regrets abouthaving yielded to my aversion, since my published works reflect my profes-sional interests and thinking in a rather unbalanced way. (Menzies Lyth, 1988,pp. viii–ix)

It is possible that she was referring to this process in an off-the-cuffremark I remember her making, when we were working together on herpapers. My memory of the incident is of it being in her elegant house inOxford, sifting through possible papers for the second volume, her cat Mintynearby. She came upon one manuscript, and said, drily, but with a tinge ofgenuine regret: ‘We spend so much time thinking about projection; we don’tspend nearly enough time thinking about how to keep things out . . . I shouldhave done more with this.’3

She reprised her dislike in the second volume of her papers, published thefollowing year:

With the chronic aversion to writing that I mentioned in Volume 1, it goeswithout saying that I have not particularly enjoyed doing so much writing(1989, pp. ix–x)

She spoke about it in conversation too, as Estela Welldon described in hercontribution to a tribute to Isabel published in the British Journal of Psy-chotherapy.4 Describing her first meeting with Isabel, Welldon writes that:

She candidly and immediately confided in me that she felt highly frustrated bythe enormous demands involved in the writing of a book . . . She told me of her

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resentment at spending her time writing and having to comply with deadlines,as opposed to being able to talk, drink and share meals with her friends.(Welldon, 2008, p. 526)

Why did she have this aversion? As far as I am aware, she never offered anexplanation for its provenance, although, as we saw in the quote above, sherued one of its effects. But we might be able to glean some ideas about itfrom what she did say about her preferred method of working. First of all, itmay be that writing didn’t tally with it. Her preferred method was to ‘getpeople talking freely, individually and in groups, and to make observations inthe field’ (Menzies Lyth, 1989, p. xi; see also 1986, p. 31). She spoke at lengthabout this in the interview with Bob Young and myself that was published asan introduction to Containing Anxiety in Institutions. Describing an iterativecycle in the original nursing research, she says:

What we did at the general hospital, when we got to a certain point in ourexplorations, was to set up a meeting of . . . all the senior nurses in the hospital.And we met once a fortnight or thereabouts, for long meetings of about threehours in which I simply fed back what we had been discovering and let themtalk about it. Now, that was fed back in perfectly ordinary language and theychewed it over . . . When they were right we modified our views, and when theywere wrong we had to get at the resistances. That went on for months beforeever anything was written down. The difficulty . . . is not really the clients somuch . . . The difficulty is when you make it public, because one can’t work itthrough with a wide audience beforehand. (Menzies Lyth, 1988, pp. 35–6,emphasis added)

She felt this problem keenly, and it attests to an arguably important differ-ence in the nature and impact of the written and the spoken, especially whenthe words may be disturbing, bewildering, or counter-intuitive.

Secondly, she was disappointed with the relative absence of influence ofthe nursing paper within the nursing profession, particularly within nursingand hospital management. Although it remains extremely well known andhas influenced generations of students, we know that the paper was contro-versial within the nursing profession (Menzies Lyth, 1988, pp. 89–99).Indeed, throughout her career Isabel was preoccupied with questions ofimpact and dissemination as well as questions of method; with the questionof translating the language of psychoanalysis into terms that could be mean-ingful to the organizations she was working with, that is, how the analyticstance could be expressed in dialogues outside the consulting room (Scott,2008a, p. 406).

A third element: if she was sceptical about the extent to which writingitself could facilitate change, this might have stemmed from her view of theapparent intractability of many organizational phenomena. As she wrote in‘A psychoanalytic perspective on social institutions’: ‘Institutions, onceestablished, may be extremely difficult to change in their essentials and they

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do actually modify the personality structure of their members, temporarilyor permanently’ (Menzies Lyth, 1986, p. 26). With regret, she wrote that ‘nota great deal happened directly as a result’ of her Fire Brigade, day care, andpsychiatric hospital studies. She continued: ‘This highlights a difficulty whichI, at least, have not solved: that of bringing about change in a large organiza-tion composed of individual smaller units. While one may change one smallunit by working in it, how does one affect the others?’ (1989, p. xi). It is atruism to say that this challenge remains.

But however difficult organizational change was, in her view, I think hercentral concern remained one of identifying what actually promotes under-standing of a situation, for individuals, groups and systems. I think Isabelreally did feel that the face-to-face encounter was what was needed. Oneexperience stands out vividly in my mind. I was working as an honorarytherapist at the Cassel Hospital in the 1990s and facilitated, with colleagues,a visit by Isabel to the Cassel. It was a return to the Cassel for her, as she hadprovided consultancy there, many years before, during Tom Main’s day(Peter Griffiths, 2010, personal communication). She was invited to attendthe Strains meeting, a weekly meeting where workers at all grades and in allroles gather to process their hospital experience. Isabel’s visit was structuredas a piece of consultancy. The presentation focused on the function of theduty team, who had delegated clinical and managerial responsibility for thehospital when other staff were not on duty: 4:15 p.m. to 9 a.m. on weekdaysand throughout the weekend. ‘As I pointed out in my letter to [Isabel], 130.5hours out of the 168 hours in a full week’ (Peter Griffiths, 2010, personalcommunication). The nursing staff felt vulnerable, the on-call doctor felt alot was on their shoulders, and so on. The presentation by the staff of theproblems was detailed and heartfelt, and conveyed the difficulty of thesituation.

With Isabel’s distinction between the large organization and its individualsmaller units in mind, we could think of the duty team as one of the ‘smallerunits’. Isabel was in her element, focusing on the specifics of the situation.She radiated still, quiet strength.The duty team set-up might contain anxietyfor other staff in the sense that it allowed them to go home, Isabel thought,but this was too heavy a burden for the nurses, both containing staff anxietiesand patients at night. What was clear in her consultative stance was herability to tease out structures, culture and differences between these in boththe day and night-time functioning of the hospital; and to bring a psycho-analytic stance to bear on the anxiety produced by the hospital system’s wayof working, itself set up to reduce anxiety, and on the resistances to thethought of possible change and why this might be so (Peter Griffiths, 2010,personal communication; see also Griffiths & Hinshelwood, 2001). Isabelwas clear there was a medical model at nights and that the system failed tocontain anxiety. She clarified precisely how many staff were working on theshift. Then she said, simply: ‘You cannot do this work with so few staff. You

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need to have more nurses on duty.’ This economy of response calls to minda letter written to Isabel by James Robertson following publication of hernursing paper: he called her diagnosis ‘so searching and, in the best sense,ruthless’.5 Let us hope that work on her archive will shed further light on theevolution of this searching ruthlessness, even if her dislike of writing mustremain a given.

Notes

1. This contribution is developed from my conference talk, and I am indebted toPeter Griffiths for dialogue about Isabel’s presentation at the Cassel.

2. Isabel’s papers were transferred to the Wellcome Library (Wellcome Collection)in the latter part of 2009, and it is anticipated that further material will be added tothe collection in due course. Work on Isabel’s papers will afford an opportunity totrace the evolution of her pared-down writing style, as the archive includes some firstdraft material with emendations. Her papers will be made available for research oncethey have been catalogued, and the BJP will provide information about this in duecourse.

3. With hindsight, it is possible that the manuscript in question is ‘Some pathologicalfeatures of introjection’ (n.d.), now in the Wellcome Library. See also Menzies Lyth,1989, p. vii, for mention of ‘Pathological aspects of introjection’, given in Brazil in1982.

4. And as other contributors in this issue of the BJP attest, cf. Judith Davies [seeabove, p. 142].

5. Letter from James Robertson to IML, 26/7/60, now in the Wellcome Library.

References

Griffiths, P. & Hinshelwood, R.D. (2001) Enquiring into a culture of enquiry. In: L.Day and P. Pringle, Reflective Enquiry in Therapeutic Institutions, pp. 29–44. CasselMonograph 2. London: Karnac.

Menzies Lyth, I. (1986) A psychoanalytic perspective on social institutions. In:Menzies Lyth, I., The Dynamics of the Social. Selected Essays, Vol. 2, pp. 26–44.London: Free Association Books, 1989.

Menzies Lyth, I. (1988) Containing Anxiety in Institutions. Selected Essays, Vol. 1.London: Free Association Books.

Menzies Lyth, I. (1989) The Dynamics of the Social. Selected Essays, Vol. 2. London:Free Association Books.

Scott, A. (2008a) Editorial [with Hilary Dewing]. British Journal of Psychotherapy24(4): 403–6.

Scott, A. (2008b) Introduction to L. Corner et al., ‘Tribute: Isabel Menzies Lyth1917–2008’. British Journal of Psychotherapy 24(4): 522.

Welldon, E. (2008) Contribution to ‘Tribute: Isabel Menzies Lyth 1917–2008’. BritishJournal of Psychotherapy 24(4): 526–7.

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