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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2021
Sylvia M. Payne was one of the first women to practice psychoanalysis in Britain. Though she became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, not a single scholarly work is dedicated to Payne's intellectual ideas—a substantial historical lacuna, especially when compared with the research on Ernest Jones, one of Sigmund Freud's early disciples and the president who preceded her. This essay presents the first exploration of her early work. It focuses on her belonging to a group of British analysts who challenged Sigmund Freud's thinking on sexual difference. The full scope of this challenge, I argue, as it emerged in interwar Britain, has remained unexamined until today. Adding to the scholarship on the prominent and lesser-known roles of women in psychoanalysis, the article shows that Payne made significant contributions to the field; she also developed the work of Melanie Klein, on whom we also need more research. The study describes the life and work of a woman who has been neglected in the historiography of twentieth-century intellectual history. It engages with broader methodological questions of how to define the political, historical role of female psychoanalysts of her generation.
1 On Ernest Jones see, for example, Brenda Maddox, Freud's Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones (London, 2006); Robinson, Ken, “A Portrait of the Psychoanalyst as a Bohemian: Ernest Jones and the ‘Lady from Styria’,” Psychoanalysis & History 15/2 (2013), 165–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 As suggested by Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (New York, 1989), 104.
3 See Shapira, Michal, “A Case for a ‘Middle-Way Career’ in the History of Psychology: The Work of Pioneer Woman Psychoanalyst Marjorie Brierley in Early 20th Century Britain,” History of Psychology 24/1 (2021), 55–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York, 1990), 101.
5 As early as 1927, Ernest Jones coined the word “phallocentrism” when he argued that Freud and other male analysts had adopted “a phallo-centric view,” meaning that Freud focused his model on the importance of the penis. See Jones, Ernest, “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 8 (1927), 459–72Google Scholar. Depending on the context, I am using the term “phallocentrism” both in Jones's terms and more broadly as it was developed by later feminists to mean occurrences when women are represented as either opposite, similar or complementary to men. See my discussion in the conclusion.
6 Recent research has emerged on Riviere, for example: Marion Bower, The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality (London, 2020). On Brierley see Shapira, “A Case for a ‘Middle-Way Career’.”
7 Another example is Shapira, Michal, “‘Speaking Kleinian’: Susan Isaacs as Ursula Wise and the Inter-war Popularisation of Psychoanalysis,” Medical History 61/4 (2017), 525–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Meira Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London, 2002); Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (New York, 1998).
8 Far beyond what a few analysts today sometimes remember about her, namely her organizational role during the Anna Freud–Klein Controversial Discussions.
9 “Dr Sylvia Payne: Psychoanalysis Pioneer,” The Times, 3 Aug. 1976, 14.
10 Pearl King, “Payne, Sylvia May,” in Alain de Mijolla, ed., International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Detroit, 2005), 1245–6. One of Payne's brothers, Henry Monck-Mason Moore, was governor general of Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Ceylon in the 1930s and 1940s. Her father was part of a Christian, evangelical, theological tradition of the Higher Life movement, and one of the founders of the annual Keswick Convention in Cumbria, England.
11 King, “Payne, Sylvia May,” 1245.
12 See UCL Bloomsbury Project, at ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project/institutions/london_school_medicine_women.htm.
13 He was a clinical assistant at the East London Hospital for Children and senior resident medical officer at the Royal Free Hospital. He then settled in practice at Torquay, and became surgeon at the Torbay Hospital and medical officer to the Post Office. During the Great War, he was a surgical specialist in command of No 1 War Hospital at Exeter. He died in 1956. See “Editorial,” British Medical Journal 1 (3 March 1956), 530.
14 One of their sons, Dr A. M.-M. Payne, born 1911, also worked at the Royal Free Hospital before 1939, eventually taking up a permanent post in 1952. He joined the Endemo-epidemic Diseases Unit of the World Health Organization, eventually becoming assistant director general. He died prematurely in 1970. See “Editorial,” A.M.-M. Payne, M.D., F.R.C.P., British Medical Journal 4 (31 Oct. 1970), 309.
15 Obituary Notices, “Sylvia M. Payne, CBE, MB, BS,” British Medical Journal 2/6032 (14 Aug. 1976), 428; Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie and Joy Dorothy Harvey, eds., The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science (London and New York, 2000), 994.
16 “The Great European War,” The Sphere: An Illustrated Newspaper for the Home, Oct. 1915, 5; “Gifts to Torquay and Exeter Red Cross Hospitals,” Western Times, 12 July 1918, 11; “An Award Op,” Western Morning News, 25 Jan. 1919, 4; “London Amusements,” Daily Mirror, 28 Jan. 1919, 11.
17 Sylvia Payne, “Dr. Ernest Jones,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 39 (1958), 308. On the larger context for such statements see Michael Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity: The ‘War Generation’ and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 343–62; Shapira, Michal, “The Psychological Study of Anxiety in the Era of the Second World War,” Twentieth Century British History 24/1 (2013), 31–57CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
18 On the spread of psychoanalysis at the time in Britain see Rapp, Dean, “The Early Discovery of Freud by the British General Educated Public, 1912–1919,” Social History of Medicine 3/2 (1990), 217–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Graham Richards, “Britain on the Couch: The Popularization of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1918–1940,” Science in Context 13 (2000), 183–230.
19 Shapira, “A Case for a ‘Middle-Way Career’”; Huppke, Andrea, “Marjorie Brierley: Ein Blick in die Frühzeit der Londoner Middle Group,” Luzifer-Amor 27/53 (2014), 52–70Google Scholar, at 54; Suzanne Raitt, “Early British Psychoanalysis and the Medico-psychological Clinic,” History Workshop Journal 58 (2004), 63–85, at 82.
20 Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner eds., The Freud–Klein Controversies, 1941–45 (New York, 1991), 10–11.
21 Huppke, “Marjorie Brierley,” 56.
22 King, “Payne, Sylvia May.”
23 Sylvia Payne, “Dr. Ernest Jones,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 39 (1958), 308.
24 In writing about the career of Dr Ethilda Budgett-Meakin Herford, another pioneer psychoanalyst and a medical doctor who started her work at the London Royal Free Hospital, moved to the Brunswick Clinic, and then to the BPAS, Payne observed her in terms she may also have applied to herself: “Her decision to study medicine was made when this was not yet regarded as a desirable career for women, and she joined the psycho-analytical group without waiting to see if it was accepted by the medical profession as a whole, and made sacrifices to obtain psycho-analytical training with those best equipped to give it.” Sylvia Payne, “Dr. Ethilda Budgett-Meakin Herford,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 38 (1957), 276–7, at 276.
25 On the early roots of the dispute see Shapira, Michal, “Interpersonal Rivalries, Gender and the Intellectual and Scientific Making of Psychoanalysis in 1940s Britain,” History of Psychology 20/2 (2017), 172–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. In 1927 Anna Freud wrote a book on child analysis criticizing Klein. Klein and a group of her British colleagues (including Glover, Riviere, Searl, Sharpe, and Jones, but not Payne) responded with a strong critique of Anna Freud's book in a symposium in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
26 Sylvia Payne, “Post-war Activities and the Advance of Psychotherapy,” British Journal of Medical Psychology (1936), 1–15, at 5.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 6. Historians have shown that the interest in spiritualism after the war was actually widespread and not confined to a minority. See, for example, Jay Winter, “Spiritualism and the ‘Lost Generation’,” in Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge, 2014), 54–77.
29 Payne, “Post-war Activities,” 7.
30 See Shapira, “The Psychological Study,” 31–57; Rapp, “The Early Discovery,” 217–43; Richards, “Britain on the Couch,” 183–230.
31 See Gregorio Kohon, “Notes on the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement in Great Britain,” in Kohon, ed., The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition (New Haven, 1986), 24–50; Riccardo Steiner, “It is a New Kind of Diaspora,” International Review of Psycho-analysis 16 (1989), 35–72.
32 See Steiner, “It is a New Kind of Diaspora”; Kohon, “Notes on the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement in Great Britain.”
33 King, “Early Biographical Notes on the Main Participants in the Freud–Klein Controversies in the British Psycho-analytical Society, 1941–45,” in King and Steiner, The Freud–Klein Controversies, xvii–xviii.
34 Obituary Notices, “Sylvia M. Payne, CBE, MB, BS,” 428.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.; Ogilvie and Harvey, The Biographical Dictionary, 994; King, “Payne, Sylvia May.”
38 King, “Payne, Sylvia May”; BPAS Archives: Annual Reports for the interwar years.
39 Obituary Notices, “Sylvia M. Payne, CBE, MB, BS,” 428. The second field to which she contributed in 1936 was the psychological understanding of reality by the individual. See Payne, “Post-war Activities,” 1–15.
40 Sylvia Payne, “A Concept of Femininity,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 15 (1935), 18–33.
41 Arden, who was an associate member of the Independent Group in the BPAS in the 1980s, thought that this was unfortunate “as Payne's attitude to femininity has been handed down in the Independent Group of the British Psycho-analytical Society. Although unrecognized, her influence is often implicit.” Margaret Arden, “A Concept of Femininity: Sylvia Payne's 1935 Paper Reassessed,” International Review of Psycho-analysis 14 (1987), 237–44, at 237.
42 Ibid.
43 Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud's Women (London, 1992), 452–4. They note, but do not explore, that Klein was key in this debate. Zenia Fliegel did much to reconstruct the history of the debate. But she, and others after her, did not notice that in Britain there was a more extensive and separate reaction to the Freudian question of female sexuality. See Zenia Odes Fliegel, “Feminine Psychosexual Development in Freudian Theory: A Historical Reconstruction,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 42 (1973), 385–408, at 386; Shapira, “A Case for a ‘Middle-Way Career’.”
44 Let me clarify further the Klein–Payne relationship: Payne was less of a close friend to Klein than Susan Isaacs or Joan Riviere—a fact that allowed Klein to undergo analysis with Payne for seven months in 1934 (and possibly before). Yet what is important here, beyond their personal as well as analyst–analysand connection, is that in the interwar period, Payne theoretically developed Klein's ideas in direct ways. Overall, we can see Payne as having been influenced by her work during this period. During the wartime Controversial Discussions, Payne helped in the clear introduction of Klein's theories and Klein saw her as “the only person who really was helpful and fair” in some of the meetings. At the end of 1942, the Kleinian position “was represented by Heimann, Riviere, and Isaacs and Sylvia Payne.” Payne also “fully endorsed” Isaacs's Kleinian paper during the discussions. See quotes from Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (New York, 1986), 308, 316, 319; on Klein's analysis see ibid., 219, 228. Yet during the war and after, Payne tried to maintain a more neutral position on the theoretical differences and came to be seen as part of the Independent Group at the society, namely those who were strict adherents neither of Klein nor of Anna Freud, and who sought compromise. To be precise, I share the understanding of Appignanesi and Forrester, who argued that Klein's interwar arguments concerning female sexuality were significant and far-reaching also because British theorists such as Brierley and others (some of who were among the Independent Group) were “profoundly influenced by her ideas whilst not necessarily being her followers,” or indeed close friends. Payne should be counted among those developing her ideas in the interwar period. See Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud's Women, 453.
45 And at times, Payne and others also helped the Jewish immigrant Klein present her ideas in English.
46 For Freud's views see Sigmund Freud, “The Infantile Genital Organization (an Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality),” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE) 14 (1923), 139–46; Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” SE 19 (1925), 248–58; Freud, “Female Sexuality,” SE 21 (1931), 221–43.
47 Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences,” 256.
48 Ibid., 257.
49 Freud, “Female Sexuality.”
50 See Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 105.
51 Melanie Klein, “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 9 (1928), 167–80; Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud's Women, 452–4.
52 It is noteworthy that Brierley had followed a similar career path to Payne, and was also a medical doctor trained at Brunswick Square Clinic. Brierley moved to the BPAS around the same time as Payne; she supported Klein's ideas in the 1920s and 1930s, and became more independent in the 1940s.
53 Nellie Thompson, “Early Women Psychoanalysts,” International Review of Psycho-analysis 14 (1987), 391–406, at 399; Marjorie Brierley, “Some Problems of Integration in Women,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 13 (1932), 433–48; Klein, “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict.”
54 Brierley, “Some Problems of Integration in Women,” 433; Melanie Klein, “Infant Analysis,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 7 (1926), 31–63.
55 Brierley, “Some Problems of Integration in Women,” 435.
56 Melanie Klein, “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 10 (1929), 436–43; Brierley, “Some Problems of Integration in Women,” 434; see also Jones, “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” 459–72.
57 Payne, Sylvia, “Observations on the Formation and Function of the Super-Ego in Normal and Abnormal Psychological States,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 7/1 (1927), 73–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 77.
58 Ibid. Indeed, in her second paper on femininity in 1936, Brierley expressed her own agreement with Payne. Marjorie Brierley, “Specific Determinants in Feminine Development,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 17 (1936), 163–80. Their work should be read together as developing new ideas about the psychoanalytic theory of female sexuality. Arden thought, “Payne and Brierley's awareness of the integrative aspect of feminine thinking is a landmark in the development of holistic thinking about psychoanalysis … In holistic terms the Oedipus complex can be expanded to include multiple identifications with male and female aspects of both parents and with other significant figures such as grandparents and teachers. This kind of thinking seems to me to be taken for granted by many Independent Group writers who are not aware of Payne's influence or the existence of her paper.” Arden, “A Concept of Femininity,” 239–40.
59 Payne, “A Concept of Femininity,” 19.
60 My formulations here are influenced by those of Grosz, Sexual Subversions, xix, xx.
61 Payne added the exclamation point here that was not in the original text, Payne, “A Concept of Femininity,” 21; cf. Joan Riviere, “Review, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis: By Sigmund Freud, M.D., LL.D,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 15 (1934), 321–39, at 336.
62 Payne, “A Concept of Femininity,” 21.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., 20.
65 Ibid., 25.
66 Ibid., 22.
67 Ibid.
68 Melanie Klein, The Psycho-analysis of Children (London, 1932), 288; as well as Josine Müller, “A Contribution to the Problem of Libidinal Development of the Genital Phase in Girls,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 13 (1932), 361–8; Karen Horney, “On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 5 (1924), 50–65; Horney, “The Denial of the Vagina–A Contribution to the Problem of the Genital Anxieties Specific to Women,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 14 (1933), 57–70, at 61.
69 Payne, “A Concept of Femininity,” 24. See also Jones, “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” 459–72; Ernest Jones, “Early Female Sexuality,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 16 (1935), 263–73; Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 10 (1929), 303–13.
70 Arden, “A Concept of Femininity,” 239–40.
71 Payne, “A Concept of Femininity,” 22.
72 Ibid., 26–30.
73 Ibid., 30.
74 Arden, “A Concept of Femininity,” 240.
75 See also Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion (New York, 1995), 158, 168.
76 Payne, “A Concept of Femininity,” 20.
77 Ibid., 31–3.
78 See Brierley, “Specific Determinants in Feminine Development,” 163–80; Thompson, “Early Women Psychoanalysts,” 399–400.
79 Cf. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC and London, 2004), 255. To borrow from Grosz on Luce Irigaray, a later theorist of sexual difference, Payne is not able to create the alternative model that Grosz describes: “It is about making the categories of men and women and their relations—their realm of sexual difference—different from the ways they currently exist, giving them an open future, granting each the awe, and, as Irigaray describes it, the surprise of an encounter between two beings who may begin to know their difference.” Grosz, The Nick of Time, 259. See also Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, 142.
80 Sylvia Payne, “Some Observations on the Ego Development of a Fetishist,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 20 (1939), 161–70.
81 Sigmund Freud, “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,” SE 7 (1905), 123–43; and later, Freud, “Fetishism,” SE 21 (1927), 147–57; Freud, “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence,” SE 23 (1940 [1938]), 271–78; Payne, “Some Observations,” 161.
82 “Women Psychoanalysts in Great Britain: Sylvia Payne née Moore (1880–1976),” in Psychoanalytikerinnen: Biografisches Lexikon, at psychoanalytikerinnen.de/greatbritain_biographies.html#Payne.
83 Payne, “Some Observations,” 161.
84 Ibid., 162.
85 Payne also noted Anna Freud's work in “Identification with the Aggressor,” in Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (London, 1993), 109–21. But overall Payne's paper is Kleinian. See Klein, “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict,” 167–180; Melanie Klein, “Weaning,” in Klein, Love, Guilt, and Reparation, and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York, 1936), 290–305.
86 Payne, “Some Observations,” 163–4.
87 Ibid., 164.
88 Ibid., 166.
89 Ibid., 167.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 167–8.
92 Ibid., 169.
93 Ibid., 170.
94 In 1938 she contributed to helping refugees from the Continent; see “The Refugees Fund,” The Times, 10 Dec. 1938, 8.
95 See, for example, Klein–Payne letters from 20 Nov. 1941 and 31 May 1942 in King and Steiner, The Freud–Klein Controversies, 196–7, 260, 263. Part of the letter from November (ibid., 196–7) illustrates their personal relationship as one of mutual respect and theoretical affinity, but not close friendship: “Dear Melanie, / Problems connected with the Society seem rather desperate. I feel the best thing I can do is to get a deeper and more complete [original emphasis] understanding of your work in connection with the depressed [sic] position. I have already a considerable insight into it but I am aware of limitations and I should help the society most (quite apart from personal considerations) by being more certain about things. Is Dr Heimann going to have her research circle? I should like to join it if I am admissible.” The letters are held in the Melanie Klein Archives at the Wellcome Institute, London.
96 According to Ogilvie and Harvey, The Biographical Dictionary, 994, too, as tensions grew between the rival camps of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, “Payne was seen as a moderate force, although she was sympathetic to Klein.”
97 King and Steiner, The Freud–Klein Controversies, xvii; Sylvia Payne, “Contribution to the Discussion of the Fundamentals of Technique,” in King and Steiner, The Freud–Klein Controversies, 648–52. See her other post-1939 writings: Payne, Sylvia, “The Principles and Methods of the Training of Child Psycho-analysts,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 24 (1943), 61–3Google Scholar; Payne, “Notes on the Theory of Psycho-analytical Therapy and Its Connection with the Theory of Technique,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 27 (1946), 12–19.
98 “Women Psychoanalysts in Great Britain,” in Psychoanalytikerinnen: Biografisches Lexikon.
99 King, “Payne, Sylvia May.”
100 King and Steiner, The Freud–Klein Controversies, xvii.
101 “Obituary Notices,” 428; Ogilvie and Harvey, The Biographical Dictionary, 994. See also her article from the time: Payne, Sylvia, “The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 44 (1963), 236–8Google Scholar.
102 Ogilvie and Harvey, The Biographical Dictionary, 994.
103 Ibid.; King, “Payne, Sylvia May.”
104 Ogilvie and Harvey, The Biographical Dictionary, 994.
105 Or alternatively they were read in theoretical isolation rather than as part of a broader British response. See the better-known paper by Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade.”
106 Riviere, “Review, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis: By Sigmund Freud,” 336.
107 In another context, Grosz's answer to this question is that attempts to fit women into a framework built on a necessary blind spot towards femininity are intellectually profitable yet impossible; they carry too high a cost both for psychoanalysis and for female sexuality. Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, 158, 168.
108 Grosz adds, “In all three cases, women are seen as variations or versions of masculinity—either through negation, identity or unification into a greater whole. When this occurs, two sexual symmetries (each representing the point of view of one sex regarding itself and the other) are reduced to one (male), which takes it upon itself to adequately represent the other.” Grosz, Sexual Subversions, xx.
109 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC, 2005), 174, also 183.
110 All taken from Grosz's different discussions on what Irigaray was attempting in her work. See Grosz, Time Travels, 175; and Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 107.
111 See Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud's Women, 457–8.