Ella Freeman Sharpe

Ella Freeman Sharpe (1875–1947) was "a pioneer of British psychoanalysis and one of the few natives of the United Kingdom among its leaders".[1] In 1947 she was "said by Sylvia Payne [to have undertaken more training analyses than any other analyst in England".[2] Among other texts, she wrote papers on "Sublimation and Delusion", and on "The Technique of Psychoanalysis".[3]

Life

"Sharpe was co-head teacher at the Hucknall Pupil Teachers Training College...where she taught from 1904 until 1916".[4] In 1917 she moved to London and entered analysis with Edward Glover's brother James, before undergoing a second analysis with Hanns Sachs after the war. She "became a full member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1923".[4] "Her 1937 sequel to Freud's dream-book, Dream Analysis: A Practical Handbook for Psycho-Analysts" has been praised "both for taking on the grammatical legacy of Freud...and for anticipating Lacan".[5] Sharpe "brings Dream Analysis to a close with an eloquent and moving 'last dream'...[that] represents Sharpe's own dream of the psyche as matrix".[6]

Lacan, the symbolic, and sublimation

Sharpe argued in her papers on sublimation that there is "no sharp borderline between penance symptoms and creative sublimations performed as counteractions against infantile sadistic strivings".[7] Investigating her own "fascination with phallic performance...she also explores the problematic aspects of the performer's identification with, and phantasied incorporation of, the phallic signifier".[8]

Lacanians have suggested that "this cultured erudite analyst, who is attentive to the virtues of the symbolic...would seem to prefigure Lacan's developments";[9] and Lacan certainly paid tribute in Ecrits to "Ella Sharpe and her very relevant remarks...She is far from ordinary in the extent to which she requires the analyst to be familiar with all branches of human knowledge".[10]

He also drew on her Dream Analysis and on "the Papers on Hamlet, which Ella Sharpe unfortunately left unfinished"[11] for material in his Seminar VI. Arguably however, "Sharpe troubles a strictly Lacanian account of the language of the unconscious" because of her emphasis on the body and the material: "For her, the language of poetry and dreams is always concrete and corporeal".[12]

Sharpe and Klein

Sharpe was among the London analysts who in the twenties "were unanimous that the relative novice Anna Freud was undermining the development of early analysis as pioneered by the experienced clinician Melanie Klein";[13] and there is a "Kleinian subtext of Sharpe's thinking during the late 1920s and early 1930s".[14]

By the time of the controversial discussions, however, Sharpe had taken a more nuanced attitude to Kleinianism, which saw her increasingly aligned with the Middle Group of British psychoanalysts. "At stake for Sharpe in the Klein wars was the phantasy of embodiment which, she strongly implies, is the pathology of Kleinianism".[15]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Gwendolyn Steevens/Sheldon Gardner, The Women of Psychology (1982) p. 129-30
  2. ↑ Mary Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (London 2005) p. 4n
  3. ↑ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 653
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Jacobus, p. 4n
  5. ↑ Jacobus, p. 4
  6. ↑ Jacobus, p. 16-7
  7. ↑ Fenichel, p. 289
  8. ↑ Jacobus, p. 28-9
  9. ↑ Veronique Voruz/Bogdan Wolf, The Later Lacan (2007) p. 244
  10. ↑ Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London 1997) p. 251
  11. ↑ Lacan, in Jacobus p. 25
  12. ↑ Jacobus, p. 4-5
  13. ↑ Brenda Maddox, Freud's Wizard (London 2006) p. 188
  14. ↑ Jacobus, p. 30
  15. ↑ Jacobus, p. 31

Further reading