Acu. | Issue #33 | Winter 2021
Inspiration
19
On the couch
Steve Wheeler
– established their own schools, Sigmund Freud, accompanied by his setting the template for wife Martha and his daughter Anna, acupuncture in the arrived at Victoria Station in London country for the on 6 June 1938, having fled the generations growing Nazi menace in Anschluss that followed Vienna for exile in England. Freud afterwards. himself would survive illness for only Member: West Wales And while another year, but his ideas, which there had preceded his arrival by decades, were many would continue to exert a powerful factors involved in the reception and influence on British life and culture for years to come. As reinterpretation of acupuncture in the WH Auden said in his memorial poem, ‘to us he is no more a west, one aspect that is often overlooked person / now but a whole climate of opinion’. is the relationship between the Initially, Freud’s ideas had not been universally popular newly introduced eastern medical in Britain. Early reviews of his work had turned their nose paradigm and the psychoanalytic up at the ‘impropriety’ of their sexual focus, and one model so dominant in the culture of the time. anonymous article in the Lancet in 1921 suggested that ‘few medical men past middle age can swallow the new psychology whole without some symptoms of indigestion, Psyche and soma culminating in… spiritual, if not physical nausea’. Even Traditional East Asian Medicine (TEAM)’s role in western when Isaiah Berlin, like so many of London’s intellectual culture was always going to be different than in the east. class, paid the customary honorary visit to Freud in his Whereas, until modern times, TEAM was the primary last year of life, the psychoanalyst’s response to learning medicine for all illnesses – mental or physical – in East Asia, that Berlin taught philosophy – ‘then you must think me in the west it was entering a medical ‘marketplace’ already a great charlatan’ – was not, Berlin would later admit, occupied by western medicine. What was simply practical entirely untrue. healthcare in the east was ‘alternative’ in the west. Perhaps Nevertheless, through the course of the first half of the it was inevitable, then, that in preference to competing 20th century, Freudian ideas percolated their way through directly with the more established modalities of physical the whole of anglophone society, appearing as much in and pharmaceutical medicine, TEAM would come to share popular magazines, bestsellers like Spock’s Baby and Child the kind of quasi-medical space occupied by psychoanalysis; Care and movies like Hitchcock’s Marnie as in the learned matters of the mind and emotions being less easily defined journals of academics and psychiatrists. By the post-war and circumscribed, they can form a kind of refuge for era, references to the ‘ego’, the ‘id’, to ‘complexes’ and alternative practices that might otherwise not survive the ‘neurosis’ were ubiquitous throughout culture. twin blizzards of xenophobic disdain and mechanistic It was into this milieu that acupuncture was first reductionism. introduced in the UK. Just as psychoanalysis was in the Certainly, the acupuncture that came to be practised in the process of developing into the many schools and flavours of west tended to focus more on matters of psycho-emotional psychotherapy, so there was a profoundly eclectic interest wellbeing than was ever the case in East Asia – though this in any and all exotic otherness as part of the search for tendency is perhaps particularly marked in the Worsley‘self-actualisation’. As China began to open up to the world lineage five element traditions, and was stronger before and the west became increasingly enamoured with eastern the establishment of more TCM-aligned courses in the culture, religion, and martial arts, some of the early pioneers 1990s and 2000s. Before considering the way in which the – such as JD van Buren, Jack Worsley, and Sidney Rose-Neil psychoanalytic ‘climate of opinion’ might have had a direct
