Chicago Psychoanalytic Society

Tuesday, January 22, 2019 – 7:00-8:50 PM

Location: Robert Morris University, 401 S State St, 8th floor auditorium

Admission is free

‘Vaccies Go Home’: Evacuation, Psychoanalysis,

and Fiction in World War II Britain

Presenter: Maud Ellmann, PhD

Discussant: Gavin Mullen, PsyD

On September 1, 1939 the British government launched a program ominously codenamed Operation Pied Piper, whereby thousands of children were evacuated from the cities to the countryside to protect them during wartime. This operation brought class conflict into the foreground, laying bare the drastic inequalities of British society, but also provided the foundations for the development of child psychoanalysis. In her talk, Dr. Ellmann examines the impact of the evacuation crisis on psychoanalytic theories of the child, most notably on the theories of Melanie Klein and Donald W. Winnicott. She also compares these theories to the depiction of children in wartime fiction.

Maud Ellmann, PhD, is the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. She has written widely on modernism and psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is The Nets of Modernism: James, Woolf, Joyce, and Freud (2010). Her other books are: The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment; Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page.

She is currently writing a comparative study of World War II fiction and psychoanalysis in Britain and France.

Gavin Mullen, PsyD, is Secretary of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society and a faculty member at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. She conducts a private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Northbrook, IL. She edited and wrote the introduction to The Selected Papers of Arnold Goldberg.

Learning Objectives:

After the presentation the participant, will be able to

1. Describe how the clinical theories of Melanie Klein and Donald W. Winnicott were influenced by the wartime experience of the evacuation of children in Great Britain;

2. Recognize the traumatic effects on children who are separated from their parents.

Admission is free. There are no reservations required. Continuing Education Credits are offered exclusively to Society members in all membership categories.