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We're grouped around the table, hunched and intense. We are a Study Circle, the Melbourne Psychoanalytic Study Circle of 1949. The postal address which used to be 111 Collins Street is now swallowed up in the multi-storey skyscraper of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Melbourne.
It is a small room, and seems smaller, crowded with eight or ten people. The ambience is post-Hapsburg central European: our teacher and spiritual guru, Dr Clara Lazar-Geroe, comes straight out of the late Austro-Hungarian Kultur. Her brightly coloured, heavily embossed embroideries cover the cushions and side-tables, and there is a Persian carpet. She speaks English with a heavy Hungarian accent.
We're all dedicated. The three psychiatrists present include one who practises at Pentridge prison, the main prison for serious offenders, in the north-west area of Melbourne. The women include a teacher who runs a progressive school in the country who, in her haste, has not had time to wash her mud-spattered ankles, and the heavily pregnant psychologist whose toddler is with the babysitter. We have completed or are completing our training analyses. Most of us know only too well the brown leather closely buttoned couch in the next room, and the 50-minute hour.
Like all fundamentalists, we use symbolic language and the words of the Master: our text book The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud (then in four volumes). For these erudite and expensive texts we are saving up. We grapple with the Master's Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1938), and, specifically, with contribution two: Infantile Sexuality, proposed in 1905.
‘Cruelty appears in the child before pity,’ says Dr Clara Geroe in her soft-spoken, ever-patient way. ‘A child cannot pity something unless he has been cruel to it first.’ The socialists among us are horrified. ‘Pity is, in the first place, a reaction formation against the parents’ disapproval of the baby's cruel and aggressive behaviour towards something, ‘she continues’.
The teacher soaks it