‘The Solution to his Own Enigma’: Connecting the Life of Montague David Eder (1865–1936), Socialist, Psychoanalyst, Zionist and Modern Saint

Abstract

This article examines the career of pioneer British psychoanalyst David Eder (1865–1936). Credited by Freud as the first practising psychoanalyst in England, active in early British socialism and then a significant figure in Zionism in post-war Palestine, and in between an adventurer in South America, a pioneer in the field of school medicine, and a writer on shell-shock, Eder is a strangely neglected figure in existing historiography. The connections between his interest in medicine, psychoanalysis, socialism and Zionism are also explored. In doing so, this article contributes to our developing understanding of the psychoanalytic culture of early twentieth-century Britain, pointing to its shifting relationship to broader ideology and the practical social and political challenges of the period. The article also reflects on the challenges for both Eder’s contemporaries and his biographers in making sense of such a life.

Introduction

When David Eder died in 1936, he received accolades from international luminaries including Sigmund Freud, Alfred Einstein and H.G. Wells, and preparations began for a volume of essays on his life and achievements.² Memoirs of a Modern Pioneer, published in 1945, included a foreword from Freud, which described Eder as the first and for some time the only doctor practising psychoanalysis in England, and presented Eder as a pioneer figure in three of the great modern movements of his age: socialism, psychoanalysis and Zionism.

Given the response to his death, but also the range of his activities, it might seem strange that he has slipped through the net of subsequent historical enquiry. No doubt, part of the reason is that he left no archive. We have his published writing, mainly in a psychoanalytic vein, but it is not substantial. We also have some scattered correspondence. Otherwise, we depend heavily on those who contributed to his memoir or who wrote in memorial fashion elsewhere. It does not help that Ernest Jones, the man who shaped the archive and historical image of the early British psychoanalytic movement, had a strong personal interest in downplaying the role of Eder.

Perhaps another factor is that his achievement in any one of these areas, in terms of leadership, institution building or writing, has not been enough on its own to attract attention. However, here priorities and perceptions of significance change; for a number of reasons, a figure such as this now emerges into view. Specifically, the early history and roots of psychoanalysis in Britain, and its setting within a broader psychological culture, has begun to attract considerable interest.³ More generally, in the shift from political and social to cultural history we have become increasingly interested in connections between political, social and intellectual movements, less tied to histories of institutions, more interested in ideas, and more open-minded about which ideas mattered. Eder’s life provides an ideal platform for such exploration, particularly for developing our understanding of the relationship between political and psychological thought and practice in the period.⁴

The second reason why a life such as Eder’s may now merit attention is that the project of making sense of this life speaks to current efforts to deploy or at least engage with psychoanalytic insight in understanding the history of this period.⁵ We have here a life that was lived and understood through the psychoanalysis of this period. We have a life in fragments, its traces remaining in Eder’s own psychoanalytic writing as well as the writing of close friends and analysts, whose views were bound up in their interpersonal relationship to Eder, as well as being often consciously psychoanalytical. Negotiating the challenge of piecing together and interpreting this material calls for some understanding of the (shifting) psychoanalytic culture of Eder’s own times. It also invites speculation of a psychohistorical kind: to what extent did and does psychoanalytic theory help to explain this life?⁶ The slippage from the one sort of psychohistory to the other – from understanding the affect of a psychoanalytic culture, to deploying this psychoanalytic theory as a tool of explanation in its own right – is one of the key issues at stake in debates about writing this type of history. The main body of this paper will piece together the available evidence to reconstruct Eder’s life. The final section will address more directly the challenges of connecting and making sense of his life.

Socialism, Medicine and the New Life

Histories of British socialism have centred on the progress of the organised Labour movement. British socialism, as a result, emerges as generally anti-intellectual, dominated by the trade unions and protective of working-class interests, with more interest in Christianity than in Karl Marx.⁷ Typically, Ross McKibbin, a leading historian of the early Labour Party, once posed the question ‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’⁸ In recent years, as ideas about the scope of the political and ideological have broadened, there has been more interest in intellectual influences;⁹ and here, to twist Mckibbin’s question, this is beginning to extend to the question of whether there was any Freudianism in British socialism?¹⁰ The short answer would be that, as with Marxism, Britain was more resistant to theory than its continental neighbours;¹¹ however, the longer answer would recognise the diffusion of new psychological ideas and practices to influence political thinking in the first half of the century, across the spectrum from Conservatives to Liberals and Socialists.¹² Eder’s career, and crucially not just intellectually but also through his psychoanalytic engagement with some of the practical challenges of socialism, provides us with fresh insight in this area; as such, it moves us beyond the study of the Labour movement’s important contribution towards the emergence of a National Health Service, which has dominated the historiography on the relationship between British socialism and medicine to date.¹³

Eder was born in London in 1865, into a prosperous Jewish family.¹⁴ He followed his father into business but with little enthusiasm. When his father died in 1886, Eder inherited a sizeable income. This freed him to leave business and become a medical student at the University of London. Living in Bloomsbury with his cousin, the novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill, he also entered the literary world.¹⁵ Zangwill would depict the tensions between his and Eder’s generation and that of their elders—between assimilation and the ghetto—in his most celebrated book Children of the Ghetto.¹⁶ He also became involved in radical politics;¹⁷ he was wounded in the ‘Bloody Sunday Riots’, sparked by a demonstration of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square in 1887; and served as Secretary of the Bloomsbury Socialist Society.¹⁸ The paths of medicine and political activism came together for Eder in anarchist Prince Kropotkin’s ‘Appeal to the Young’.¹⁹ This essay, first published in 1880 and inspired by the Russian movement of intellectuals going out to the people, was specifically directed at lawyers, doctors, teachers and scientists, with doctors directed to moving beyond the cure of disease to address its prevention.²⁰

Eder’s slow progress as a medical student suggests that his heart was certainly, as Kropotkin had directed, temporarily elsewhere. After four attempts he eventually received his MD in 1895. Around this time, several reports note that he also took a degree in psychology (though the exact nature of this degree remains unclear).²¹ In doing so, he was perhaps following Kropotkin’s calls for a reorientation away from revolutionary violence towards a politics of individual self-development and a search for a higher morality; though Eder later pointed out that the subject of psychology at this time had ‘as little bearing on human affairs as the study of dry bones’.²² Movements such as the ‘Fellowship of the New Life’ followed Kropotkin and Tolstoy in breaking away from the economistic and statist strands of British socialism typified by Fabianism.²³ Their energies went into vegetarianism, clothes reform, animal rights, sexual reform and a love of nature.²⁴ Undoubtedly, Eder was part of this bohemian, fin-de-siècle atmosphere. However, over the next two decades, his pursuit of the ‘new life’ led him away from Britain altogether.

Imperialism, Medicine and the Psychic Interior

In 1895, Eder took his new wife Florence to South Africa, where he set up his first medical practice in Johannesburg, a city in the midst of a gold-mining boom.²⁵ The departure may have been influenced by having just been dragged through the courts and exposed in the press over his involvement in an alleged insurance fraud involving a yacht. The case was not proven, but for five days the private details of Eder’s affair with Florence, as a married woman, her subsequent divorce, and then their ongoing involvement with the ex-husband and his new wife—details the judge characterised as ‘shocking and repulsive’—were paraded in public.²⁶ Letters from South Africa to Zangwill reveal Eder as a man who was disillusioned with his youthful political idealism, but also with medicine, keen just to make his fortune. He now cared not about ‘psychology or sociology’ but ‘the narrow instincts of class’, or as he put it in another letter, ‘fat dinners, fat wives, stalls at the theatre, trips to Brighton or the equivalent, long morning sleeps and half-crowns to beggars’.²⁷ The adventure lasted only a year. In 1898, Eder set off once more, this time to Columbia, again accompanied by his wife, where his uncle was a leading figure in the sugar industry. The country was in the midst of political revolution, but there is no sign that Eder showed any desire to be involved, other than in his capacity as a doctor. In 1901 and 1903, he took further trips to South America. On the second trip, he took on a post as medical officer for the Bolivian Government, and he had hopes of setting up a model hospital and staking out a career in tropical medicine.²⁸ However, the chaotic political situation disrupted such plans; on one occasion, he was said to have been in danger of starving to death and being eaten by cannibals; on another, he was suspected of being a spy of Anglo-American concession hunters. The realities he encountered appear to have added to his disillusion with the ‘foolish business’ of medicine, as he described it to Zangwill:

We can cure about half a dozen diseases—but people are so disgusted with our talk of our advancement of medicine and the poor results they see that they fail to come to be cured of the few infirmities we can deal with... There has been a great advance in health, but mainly due—not to doctors.²⁹

Eder’s admiring future patient, the writer and sexual progressive Ethel Mannin, would suggest that the personal pain and conflict experienced in his travels to ‘the wild places of the earth’ in these years, prior to and even more than the later influence of Freud, would be crucial in the making of Eder as a psychoanalyst. She also claimed that he tried out hypnotism and suggestion in South America.³⁰ Others would also draw parallels between his roles as an explorer of a dangerous physical as well as mental interior.³¹ Eder may have been going through his own inner turmoil (probably more a result of personal difficulties than of reaction against colonialism), but at the time he appears to have directed his main scientific energies towards the study of native beetles, butterflies and flowers rather than minds.³² A letter to Zangwill discussing depression indicates that Eder was familiar with the problem within medicine, but not particularly expert. Here, his comment that the normal advice of a change of scene did not necessarily provide the opportunity ‘to get away from oneself’ may be illuminating for his personal situation.³³ Mannin would write that Eder’s travels to South America were an attempt to work out his own inner conflicts.³⁴ By this time, Eder was himself using the language of discovering the new world of the Americas as an analogy to the profound Freudian breakthrough of penetrating through the ‘tropical darkness’ to the Pacific of the psychic landscape within.³⁵

Studies of the horrors and ‘savagery’ encountered by other travellers to the Amazon region in this era, most notably focusing on the experiences of Roger Casement, suggest that this could also be a foundational politicising experience, leading towards an economic and political critique of the barbarism of colonialism.³⁶ However, there is limited evidence to confirm such a link in the case of Eder.³⁷ The situation may have begun to change with his next trip to South America in 1903, when he believed that he would be setting up a hospital for the Bolivian government but ended up in the employment of an Anglo-American, concession-hunting rubber expedition, trapped within a civil conflict.³⁸ Even here, however, the account of the episode that remains is one of adventures and personalities rather than colonial critique or political involvement.³⁹ Letters home suggest that in terms of British imperialism he may not have been an enthusiast but neither was he a decided opponent. He was glad to escape the music-hall jingoism of London, but he believed that the Boer War could act as a wake-up call to British complacency and felt that the conflict had been inevitable.⁴⁰ Indeed, Zangwill described the Eder of this period as being as much an Imperialist as he was a Zionist.⁴¹ In Eder’s final trip to South America in 1907, he began to bring these two projects together, acting on behalf of the Jewish Territorial Organisation to investigate the possibility of purchasing land for a Jewish settlement in Brazil and then West Africa. Up until this point he had been a sceptic, as is clear in correspondence with Zangwill – who was one of the Territorial movement’s leading figures. He had certainly seen little hope in the example of the Jews in South Africa;⁴² and as a socialist and a secularist he had been content to accept Marx’s dictum that the solution to the Jewish question was bound up with the dissolution of capitalism.⁴³ It is intriguing that the first step in turning away from this position was in part an outcome of Eder’s involvement in informal, economic imperialism.

Socialism, Sex and the Emergence of Psychoanalysis in Britain

After two decades of wandering overseas and now forty years old, Eder returned to construct a career in Britain. In this period, we see for the first time his recognition that medicine, through the introduction of a psychological dimension, could be not just a route to self-advancement but also a tool of socialism. The experience of serving briefly as Medical Officer in a Cumberland mining village in 1902, in between foreign excursions, had shown him the extent of poverty and squalor that still handicapped Britain’s own working-class population. He now took up an appointment as a school medical officer in Poplar, London, where he could tackle the ill health of Britain’s poorest classes. Politically, he fell out with the increasingly statist Fabians. With James Middleton, he helped to found the London Labour Party, and he looked towards the Independent Labour Party, with its advocacy of practical reform. As fellow doctor and socialist Harry Roberts recalled:

He was no slave to collectivist or communist clichés; the state to him was but a sensible federation created for the benefit of each one of its members—an organisation that would save the individual from eternal concentration on bare existence problems. He was too human to contemplate without repugnance the sacrifice of individual men and women to such an abstraction as the state.⁴⁴

Eder now became a regular contributor on medical subjects in the radical periodical The New Age.⁴⁵ In 1907, he designed a scheme for ‘The Endowment of Motherhood’.⁴⁶ Eder’s experience around the world had perhaps shown him that many of civilised society’s ills were due to the artificial imposition of a restrictive morality.⁴⁷ Socialism, too often tied to a narrowly economic viewpoint, and too often conceptualising the people as a mass, needed to confront such biological and human problems, consider human desires, and focus on the importance of individuality. A concern about national efficiency was making welfare of children and consequently of mothers a serious political issue.⁴⁸ Eder shifted the emphasis to the needs and interests of the women. Women had an instinctive desire to bear children, and it was therefore society’s responsibility to support this self-development. However, it was wrong for society to chain these women to motherhood. His endowment scheme proposed a weekly wage for mothers in the form of free housing in maternity homes, free food and fuel.

The endowment scheme also countered the eugenic vision that found growing support among progressives, including socialists.⁴⁹ Alongside a relaxation of sexual morality and monogamy it would promote early unions. It would lead to healthy births, prevent unhealthy repression and resulting perversions and, through encouraging healthy sexual intercourse, would foster mental and physical wellbeing. On libertarian grounds, Eder rejected both calls for surgical sterilisation of the unfit, and laws that would require medical certificates and family pedigrees before marriage. The state could pursue Malthusianism instead through distribution of free preventives and legalisation of abortion.⁵⁰ Eder continued to voice libertarian opposition to eugenics as pressure mounted for segregation of the feeble-minded, leading to the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. Allying with Stephen Reynolds, author of the working-class memoir and riposte to statism, Seems So, Eder criticised the calls for such legislation through articles in The Nation, Eye-Witness, The Westminster Gazette and The Daily Herald, as well as the New Age. Staunch opponent of the Mental Deficiency Bill, Liberal MP Josiah Wedgwood, called on Eder as a medical witness to attack the loose definition of mental deficiency and to support the view that the poor would be the main targets of the legislation.⁵¹ However, they were moving against the collectivist and eugenic tide. With only a few minor amendments, and an overwhelming majority, the Mental Deficiency Act became law, leading to care and control of over 60,000 mainly working-class men and women by the eve of the Second World War.⁵²

Eder was not only fighting against a form of state intervention which was anathema to his brand of socialism, he also felt that it was foolish to be so pessimistic about the value of ‘mental defectives’ just as psychologists were on the threshold of a much deeper understanding of the mind. It is not clear at what date Eder first encountered or practised with the ideas of Freud. Ernest Jones would be adamant that he, not Eder, had led the way. However, with Jones having to leave Britain for Canada from 1908 to 1913, after a second alleged case of sexual misdemeanour with a minor, it may be the case that Freud’s remarks about Eder being the only person in England practising analysis at this time make perfect sense. Indeed, there is record of Freud telling Jones this on his return to England.⁵³ Eder was certainly already drawing on Freud to support his critique of the existing sexual morality in the 1907 ‘Endowment of Motherhood’.⁵⁴

This interest was furthered by his work with schoolchildren, particularly through his involvement with Margaret McMillan, first at Devon’s Road School Clinic in Bow, and then at her clinic in Deptford in London, from 1909.⁵⁵ McMillan, herself an important figure within the Independent Labour Party, drew on psychological theory to develop a child-centred education. Aware of the terrible physical condition of many poor children, she campaigned for school medical inspection and clinics despite the resistance of many within her party towards the intervention of the state in the lives of working-class families. As in the case of Eder, advancing state services in this area was a means to facilitate the mental and spiritual self-development of children: the latter, rather than the former, the higher aim of socialism.⁵⁶ This emphasis on the self rather than the state (and its concerns over national efficiency) offers us an alternative perspective on the advance of child welfare in the period.⁵⁷

In 1910, with Dr James Kerr, head of the School Medical Services of the London County Council, Eder founded School Hygiene, the first medical journal in Britain devoted to the health of the schoolchild. He remained as Editor until 1915, and then served again after the war, from 1918 to 1921, when the journal folded under financial pressure. In the very first issue, suggesting the influence of Eder, McMillan projected Kropotkin’s ‘Appeal’ to the growing ranks of medical officers who were finally reaching out to the British people through local authority schools. At such a ‘threshold’ it was crucial to break down the suspicion and resistance of the working people, and the first step would be a personal transformation of the doctors themselves.⁵⁸ Eder used School Hygiene as a vehicle to spread his growing enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, with articles from Ernest Jones and other psychoanalysts as early as 1911, and supported Montessori education as a route towards individual but also social transformation.⁵⁹

However, Eder’s interest in Freud would test the limits of a shift in focus from the healthy child body to the healthy child mind.⁶⁰ Freudian ideas about sex were still highly controversial in pre-war Britain, so Eder became notorious when he openly spoke about the subject on a public stage. In 1911, he delivered a paper to the British Medical Association on treatment of hysteria by psychoanalysis, the first Freudian paper delivered in this setting.⁶¹ The audience demonstrated its own view on the subject—Eder described releasing a patient’s sexual memories of lying naked in bed aged three stroking his sister—as it followed the Chairman out of the room in silent disapproval.⁶² He was again at the centre of controversy when, in 1914, he and his second wife Edith presented a paper on ‘The Unconscious Mind in the Child’ to the North of England Education Conference, openly discussing child sexuality.⁶³ The paper did not initially provoke any outcry and appeared in Child Study, but the complaints that followed publication were such that every copy had to be withdrawn.⁶⁴

Eder’s involvement with psychoanalysis gained pace. It appears to have provided a unity, previously missing, between his medical and political aspirations. Medicine on its own might be crucial to alleviating suffering, but it could also be dispiritingly materialist; psychoanalysis offered medicine a key to the personal growth that had always been a central objective of his socialism.⁶⁵ The new science, though still regarded with deep suspicion within medicine and psychiatry, was now attracting the sort of intellectual energy which had fuelled the socialism of ‘New Lifers’ in the 1890s.⁶⁶ His divorce and then marriage to Edith Low in 1909 brought links to her sister Barbara Low, who was to write one of the bestselling accounts of psychoanalysis in Britain.⁶⁷ It also brought further personal turmoil: Florence, his first wife, had committed suicide after Eder ran off and left her for Edith, who was then a married woman. No doubt, this was a further factor in his immersion in psychoanalysis. Eder and Edith both entered a course of analysis: with Jung and Jones respectively.⁶⁸ Eder was deeply impressed by Jung, and the following year went to Vienna to meet Freud, though was frustrated not to gain any personal training.⁶⁹ He was already using suggestion and hypnosis in his general practice, but for someone with Eder’s libertarian instincts, psychoanalysis was preferable because it helped the patient to discover what he could and must do instead of telling him.⁷⁰ In 1912, he set up his own psychoanalytic clinic in Welbeck Street in London;⁷¹ he also worked at a clinic on the corner of Charlotte and Percy Streets as a ‘poor man’s doctor’;⁷² and, in 1913, he helped to found the London Psycho-Analytic Society, serving as its first Secretary.⁷³

War, Psychoanalytic Schism, the New Life and the Turn to Zionism

As one commentator has put it, the ‘Eders were the epitome of progressivism’. Edith, a fellow divorcee, was ‘the New Woman personified’: a vegetarian, who walked around in flat heels and an Egyptian jibbah, who had been analysed by Jung, and had had an affair with H.G. Wells.⁷⁴ It was through this bohemian environment that Eder came to know D.H. Lawrence. Their close relationship is evident in surviving correspondence, mainly one way from Lawrence to Eder, which reveals the novelist’s striking admiration for Eder. In the midst of writing Sons and Lovers, Lawrence was keen to discuss the Freudian implications of his work and to espouse his own vision of human nature.⁷⁵ But Lawrence also saw Eder, with his experience of South America and his associations with sexual libertarianism, as the man who might help him to establish a utopian ‘new life’ community—a ‘Rananim’—away from the repression and decay of old-world Britain.⁷⁶ As Eder became involved in the Zionist search for a new land in Palestine, this fascination continued, despite Lawrence’s anti-semitism.⁷⁷

Lawrence’s pessimism about life in Britain became stronger than ever through his experience of wartime conformity and the suspicion and hostility he encountered as a young man unfit for combat and married to a German wife.⁷⁸ By contrast, Eder channelled his energies into the war effort. With the outbreak of war, as ever a man of action and robust health, even though he was now nearly fifty, Eder was involved in early efforts to organise a Jewish battalion and then volunteered to serve as a doctor, taking charge of a shell-shock hospital in Malta in 1916.⁷⁹ He wrote up his experiences first as a Lancet article ‘War Neuroses’ and, in 1917, as a book, War-Shock.⁸⁰ In fact, it was Eder, rather than the better-known W.H.R. Rivers, who first brought a Freudian perspective to bear on the problem of shell-shock in the British Army; and he serves as an example of the way an interest in Freud could predate rather than spring from the war experience.⁸¹ He was adamant that the mental suffering of the ordinary troops was not to be confused with malingering.⁸² His account stands out in the shell-shock literature for its humane and sympathetic approach to working-class troops, a position which reflected his political radicalism. He, like a growing band of other doctors, dismissed the idea that mental breakdown was the result of a physical ‘shell-shock’ from explosions, seeing it instead as stemming from a conflict towards the war situation itself; hence his choice of the term ‘war-shock’. However, the psychoanalytical tone of Eder’s position, albeit diluted in the wartime context, did not win favour in the army and prompted a return to England.⁸³

These years also saw his expression of sympathy for Jung. This was increasingly unacceptable to strict Freudians such as Ernest Jones now that Jung had broken with the movement;⁸⁴ and this was a factor when Jones dissolved the London Psycho-Analytic Society in 1919, replacing it with the British Psycho-Analytic Society, leaving Eder isolated from the movement.⁸⁵ Tensions between the two may also have had something to do with Edith’s analysis with Jones, spilling over, it seems, into an affair whose traces remain in an intimate correspondence from Edith to her analyst.⁸⁶

From 1918 to 1922, Eder’s main energies had shifted to centre on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The political movement of Zionism, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1895, had initially attracted some of Eder’s closest friends, in particular his cousin Zangwill.⁸⁷ As a socialist and a secularist Eder had distanced himself, however his work in the East End of London heightened his consciousness of the extent of poverty among Britain’s Jewish population, and together with his knowledge of South America, led to his involvement with Zangwill when the latter broke away from Zionism to broaden the search for a homeland beyond Palestine through the International Territorial Organisation. Later, at the outbreak of war, his involvement in the scheme to recruit a Jewish unit for the British forces was partly in the hope that this would increase Jewish influence when it came to a post-war settlement.⁸⁸ Nevertheless, the decision to involve himself so fully with Zionism from 1918 was a major change of direction.⁸⁹ It meant temporarily dropping much of his medical and socialist work. To some extent, it reflected dissatisfaction with political developments in both spheres. His involvement in socialist party politics came to a halt; here the war was transforming the landscape, as an era of ideological and factional debate made way for one of party discipline and machinery, with the Labour Party emerging as one of the two main parties in Britain’s political system.⁹⁰ When it came to psychoanalysis, the tension with Freudians such as Jones, provoked by Eder’s interest in Jung, similarly left his political energies looking for a new home.

In Palestine, Eder was the nominee of the International Territorial Organisation on the Zionist Commission, set up by the British to deal with the Jewish population. An assimilated Jew, an Englishman, and closely associated with the Territorialists, he met considerable initial suspicion from the Zionists.⁹¹ He overcame this through force of personality, his acumen in dealing with practical social and medical problems in the aftermath of the war, and his rapid conversion to the cause.⁹² He had the challenge of overcoming mistrust towards the Zionists from the Palestinian Jewish population—the Yishuv. He had to rely on British support but, at the same time, pressurise them to act on the Balfour Declaration promise of establishing a Jewish national home. He also had to make allies with Arab politicians in the region by recognising the interests of Arabs in Palestine, while making no concession on the need for open immigration and the ultimate aim of a Jewish nation. The challenge of such negotiation was considerable, and it provides us perhaps with the first instance of someone with the skills of the psychoanalyst deploying such insight in the sphere of high politics. However, there are indications that the personal strain was difficult to cope with.⁹³ In addition, he committed himself wholeheartedly to the practical demands of social reconstruction. Here, his socialist background proved valuable in negotiating with the Jewish labour movement. He also continued his medical, educational and social work, setting up orphanages and combating lack of sanitation and widespread disease.⁹⁴ There was even some opportunity to explore the use of psychoanalysis within this work.⁹⁵ His appetite for helping the poor and distressed was perhaps better satisfied here than at any other stage of his life. Here too, the vision of ‘the new life’, and the role of the ‘pioneer’ was realised in its most concrete form.

Psychoanalysis, Maturity and the Myth of Progress

Eder remained a committed and active Zionist for the rest of his life, but his work in Palestine finished in 1922.⁹⁶ Behind the departure, there were reportedly ‘compelling personal reasons’, but their exact nature remains unclear. The experience added further to his reputation as a man not just of great experience of life, but one who had been through sorrow, grief and suffering.⁹⁷ He returned to a psychoanalytical career in England where such a personal aura was impressive and distinguished him from the younger and less worldly generation who were now moving into the field. By this time he was in dissent with Jung and he returned to the Freudian fold, as he first sought analysis under Karl Abraham in Berlin, and then entered eight months of analysis under Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest. In 1923, he rejoined the British Psycho-Analytic Society, and took up a position as Physician to the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis.

In this final stage of his career, his energies would shift from founding political and medical movements, to reflecting from a psychoanalytical perspective on those movements as he and they reached maturity.⁹⁸ In 1924, he contributed an essay on ‘Psycho-Analysis and Politics’ to a volume edited by Ernest Jones entitled Social Aspects of Psychoanalysis.⁹⁹ The volume was representative of the social orientation of psychoanalysis and of psychology in this era of international, economic and political turmoil.¹⁰⁰ Eder was reticent to use the theory to support his own political position: ‘I do not stand as the advocate from the psycho-analytic standpoint of any political or economic views’.¹⁰¹ Instead, his argument was that psychoanalysis could offer a deeper map for understanding political ideology and practice. Elections became episodes in the sublimation of regicide, ultimately Oedipal in origin. Class war was the rebellion of the children against the fathers. The constitution, law and order, even Das Kapital, were replacements for the father. The fixation on the gold standard and the capitalist obsession with hoarding money were expressions of a repressed coprophilia. In taking such an approach, Eder was also distancing himself from his pre-war institutional engagement with politics.¹⁰² Indeed, psychoanalysis, rather than socialism, begins to emerge as the tool for ‘greater changes in human nature than our written records can show’ and ‘a reformation inspired by an understanding of and a power to deal with’ the unconscious. He looked forward now to a future in which all mankind, like the privileged few who had undergone psychoanalysis, would be able to bring unconscious material into consciousness and self-understanding.¹⁰³

In his essay of 1929, ‘On the Economics and Future of the Super-Ego’, he reiterated the potential social and political importance of psychoanalysis, despite its own hesitations: ‘Psycho-analysis pursuing its modest therapeutic aim and making no pretence to, nay, discarding, any ambition to reform society, yet cannot help but disclose the paths that lie open to the future.’¹⁰⁴ A year later, his essay ‘Psychology and Value’ presented psychoanalysis as a tool for analysis of economics.¹⁰⁵ This was at the height of Britain’s economic crisis, with the Labour leadership tied to monetary orthodoxy, and with no attempt to integrate the findings of the new psychology into economic theory.¹⁰⁶ However, as in his earlier socialism, Eder’s central concern remained individual self-development. The key problem facing modern man was the inheritance of an unconscious not designed to cope with the modern world, leaving man in conflict, repressed, and not fully himself. Just as socialism was needed to remove the shackles of capitalism and authoritarianism, which acted as external constraints on man’s free expression of his identity, so psychoanalysis now pointed the way to releasing his internal chains: ‘Man will at some later or earlier date have to accept full responsibility for himself and his doings. He will learn to regulate his relationships to his fellows and to the world, without reference to codes imposed by past fears and present anxieties.’¹⁰⁷

Eder’s final attempt to address politics through psychology was his essay ‘The Myth of Progress’ of 1932.¹⁰⁸ Here, psychoanalysis exposed the idea of progress—which lay at the heart of liberalism as well as socialism—as a myth used by man to make sense of his world. In the twentieth century, there were signs that the faith in progress was disappearing, in the face of rising racial animosities, class struggles and the Great War. Science, too, provided less reason for confidence than it once had, as a universe of order found itself under siege to a physics of relativity. Psychoanalysis was doing something similar in the realms of the human sciences as it challenged faith in rationalism. Eder put it starkly, and in a manner that shocked his contemporaries:

We are born mad, acquire morality and become stupid and unhappy. Then we die. This, the natural history of man under domestication, is so rigid a sequence under a variety of forms and changes in the patterns of civilisation, that mankind has invariably found it helpful to find a refuge in myths to relieve its perplexity and to mitigate its unhappiness.¹⁰⁹

It would be easy to conclude that in recognising progress as a myth Eder was descending into pessimism and retreating from the world of political action.¹¹⁰ In fact, he was presenting psychological self-understanding as a way to come to terms with man’s innate aggression and resulting need for association with creeds and moral codes. As such, he was coming close to suggesting that psychoanalysis might guide a new path of progress beyond such a situation. Moreover, he showed no signs of a retreat into apathy: his support of Zionism continued; he worked strenuously to aid Jewish medical refugees escape Nazi Europe and find work in Britain;¹¹¹ and, in 1932, he helped to set up the socially radical Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency with Edward Glover, realising the Kropotkian project of treating rather than punishing the criminal.¹¹² Indeed, when he died, as a result of a heart attack in 1936, it was attributed to sheer exhaustion. On the other hand, there is little evidence that he continued to participate in British socialist politics. He was said to be very disappointed by the timid response of British politicians to the European dictators, particularly that of Ramsay MacDonald, a fellow member of the Independent Labour Party in its early days. The Labour Party, moreover, showed little interest in integrating an understanding of psychology into either its political strategy or its economic and social philosophy.¹¹³ If it was influenced at all, it was in the limited sense of its suspicion of the irrational psychology of the ‘masses’, particularly when under the influence of a press which was hostile towards socialism: a philosophy which was far removed from Eder’s vision of recognising the single human being in the mass.¹¹⁴ What we have here is a case, on the one hand, of the institutional links between psychoanalysis and socialism weakening rather than strengthening in the first half of the century, but, on the other, of a greater ideological synergy and greater potential for psychoanalysis as a practical tool in welfare. Eder exemplifies this reorientation. His writing reflected the fact that in the aftermath of the destruction of the First World War and then in the midst of inter-war political and economic difficulties, psychoanalysis was drawn beyond a focus on the internal problems of the individual to address instead the way these problems were embedded in and directly contributed to social and political reality; and his commitment to extending access to psychoanalytic practice reflected a tendency which has also recently been emphasised as characteristic of a leftwards reorientation of inter-war European psychoanalysis.¹¹⁵

The Making and Disappearance of a British Psychoanalytic Saint

It is not completely clear why nearly a decade passed between Eder’s death and the publication of his memorial volume in 1945. The obvious answer is that there was some delay in bringing together contributions and organising publication because of the disruptions of the Second World War. When Eder died in 1936, the obituary in The Times emphasised his contribution to the Zionist movement above all else, with just passing mention of his involvement in socialism and psychoanalysis.¹¹⁶ This is in contrast to his recent entry in the New Dictionary of National Biography, which now casts him primarily as a figure in the early history of psychoanalysis.¹¹⁷ The earlier reading of his significance is evident in the immediate launch of an appeal to establish a memorial library in his name in Jerusalem.¹¹⁸ His role in Zionism also attracts the most space in the memorial volume.¹¹⁹

Memoirs of a Modern Pioneer does not read as if written across the divide of the Second World War and the Holocaust. There is no discussion of these events. Indeed, the foreword from Freud, who died three years after Eder in 1939, reminds us of the way in which the volume, in large part, reflected views gathered before the war. With his interest in the psychoanalytic underbelly of political belief and action, and his apparently gloomy predictions about the end of progress, Eder may well have seemed a significant figure as Europe fell into the Second World War; hence the inclusion of his essay on the ‘Myth of Progress’ at the end of the volume.¹²⁰ His retreat from view and the failure of the volume to cement his reputation perhaps owed something to the fact that, after 1945, people looked to progress with renewed hope and set aside anxieties about human nature.¹²¹ Most fundamentally, however, it reflects the widening gulf in British psychoanalytic culture, dividing its diverse and radical origins from the mature, institutional movement.

The editor of Memoirs of a Modern Pioneer, J.B. Hobman, was a journalist who had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal candidate in the 1920s and 1930s. He retired from active journalism in 1942, at the age of seventy, apparently struggling to cope with the strain of the war situation.¹²² Hobman had come to know Eder in the last decade of his life. On the one hand, he encountered stories of pioneering and often distant adventures, all surrounded by a degree of mystery, and allusions to conflict and suffering. On the other, he came face-to-face with the figure of a man of ageing flesh and blood solidity and humanity; not the fearsome and restless figure of the story but an object of calm, tolerance and widespread affection. Hobman brought the two together in the narrative of the man coming to embody the journey and its lessons; a story of the path from medicine, via socialism, personal turmoil and Zionism, towards resolution in self-realisation and psychoanalysis, and thus the unification of personality, work and belief. ¹²³

It is not clear whether Hobman was a patient of Eder’s, but his viewpoint is strikingly similar to that put forward by those who were. One such account comes from writer Ethel Mannin, who included Eder as one of the entries in her Confessions and Impressions of 1934. Again, there is the emphasis on the embodiment of experience (and not just the value of psychoanalytic theory on its own):

He knows all there is to know about human nature. I am aware that this is a big statement, but I make it without any qualification whatever. He did not acquire this knowledge merely by reading text-books; complete knowledge of anything so intricate as the mental and emotional mechanism of the human being is not to be gained like that. He knows the human mind because he has himself endured fundamental experiences, pain and conflict, and in his wanderings in all parts of the world come into contact with all kinds and classes of people.¹²⁴

Time after time, memoirists emphasised the remarkable personal qualities of the man in his later life and the idea that these made sense of and provided a narrative resolution for the stories of his earlier life. By his later years, Eder was clearly a man who impressed deeply, but often through little obvious effort; he was said to be ‘quiet, unassuming, unobtrusive’, not qualities one normally associates with the remarkable personality; and Hobman recalled that he ‘never knew David Eder obtrude his rich and varied experience’.¹²⁵ Invariably, people remembered him with a striking degree of affection; one might say love. This extended from his friends and family, to a diplomat such as Sir Wyndham Deedes, even to a figure such as Freud, who wrote to Barbara Low that Eder’s death had concerned him ‘in a quite special way’ since he had ‘belonged to the people one loves without having to trouble about them’.¹²⁶

Such publicly expressed feelings may account for some of the frustration and jealousy of Ernest Jones, faced by what seemed like an exercise in anointing Eder as Britain’s first psychoanalytic saint in the aftermath of his death. This tension went back to 1922 when an interview by Barbara Low in Lloyds Sunday News already aired this idea of Eder’s primacy. It exploded in 1945 with the publication in Hobman’s volume of Freud’s apparent designation of Eder as Britain’s first psychoanalyst, and to add salt to the wound this was repeated on the BBC radio programme Brains Trust. Jones presented this as an issue of outright misrepresentation and tried to drag in Anna Freud to defend his own primacy.¹²⁷ However, at stake was also something more fundamental about the image and style of psychoanalysis in Britain. Eder, with his earlier forays away from orthodoxy, was associated with the schismatic route. Moreover, as Mannin had said, there was a sense that his psychoanalysis owed as much to life experience, personality and the power of personal influence, as it did to sticking strictly to doctrinal orthodoxy. It is possible that such an approach was reinforced when Eder underwent analysis with the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi on his return from Palestine. At the time, Ferenczi was beginning to develop ideas and a style of practice that would see him pilloried as mentally ill by the time of his death in 1933. In orthodox Freudian analysis, the analyst’s role was simply to listen to the patient; Ferenczi opened up analysis as a less austere and more intimate, interpersonal and interventionist dialogue in which the therapist could bring in material from his own life.¹²⁸ Descriptions of Eder suggest that he too may have taken on something of this style, and this would help explain why he made such an impact on those around him in terms of his own story of finding himself. Such issues of orthodoxy were particularly sensitive at this time. Publication of the memorial volume came at the end of a period of intense in-fighting within the British movement—the ‘Controversial Discussions’ pitting Freudians against Kleinians over psychoanalysis of children—which saw Edward Glover, Eder’s psychoanalytic advocate in the Hobman volume, leave the British Society.¹²⁹ Equally important, in a period of mourning for Freud after his death in 1939, it is easy to see the appeal but also the sensitivity in a project of mourning for Eder as Britain’s own psychoanalytic father. In short, Freud’s designation of Eder as Britain’s first psychoanalyst was just the start of what upset Jones when he read the Hobman volume.

In many ways, this narrative of Eder finding himself, finding a career that perfectly matched this self, and manifesting his achievement in his personality – the narrative of modern, secular sainthood—emerges as an even more pervasive and powerful way of explaining Eder than did the idea of the ‘modern pioneer’ of the memorial volume’s title.¹³⁰ The narrative of the ‘Modern Pioneer’ turned Eder’s complexity, and his move from one field of endeavour to another, from being a problem in need of biographical and intellectual explanation, to a central and heroic explanatory tool in its own right.¹³¹ It was particularly successful in neatly bringing together his role as pioneer of both geographic and intellectual frontiers, evident most strikingly in the way his contemporaries drew parallels between his exploration of the South American and the psychic interior. Indeed, the way that Eder’s life does suggest connections between early psychoanalysis and modes of colonialism (whether via the exploration of a heart of darkness in South America, or that of the Zionist pioneer) merits further attention.¹³² The pioneer narrative was also the obvious way of historicising Eder. It presented Eder as a figure from another age, the embodiment of earlier struggle. As such, the narrative of the modern pioneer (and then of ‘Dear Old Eder’—a constant refrain among his memoirists) also spoke for the maturity of these movements in the present. For a leader in the still relatively insecure British psychoanalytic movement, such as Edward Glover, this had a rather different purpose to that of a socialist such as Harry Roberts, nostalgic for the radicalism of the past.

The narrative of the ‘Modern Pioneer’ is less helpful when it comes to the question of what, if any, ideological coherence or intellectual trajectory there was in Eder’s multiple activities. Here, there is a case for agreeing with psychoanalyst Edward Glover, certainly in relation to Eder’s brand of new-life socialism—with its mix of Kropotkin, New Age radicalism and sex reform—and then his psychoanalytic career, that Eder was a champion for the ‘war of psychic liberation’; and indeed, for arguing that this represented a broader development during the period.¹³³ In this regard, Eder sits alongside a figure such as Edward Carpenter or a phenomenon such as the New Age as part of an alternative turn-of-the-century radical trajectory, which brought together socialism with the new psychology or associated mysticism in a higher synthesis. This prefigures and contrasts somewhat with the ‘psychological socialism’ of improving qualities of mind recently highlighted by Jeremy Nuttall; the latter more anxious about the minds and morality of the masses, and more concerned as a result to look to the tools of the state, and education in particular, in the cultivation and imposition of goodness.¹³⁴ It is harder, however, to extend this trajectory of ‘psychic liberation’ to Eder’s commitment to Zionism in the second half of his life; and there is a sense that even at the time this seemed to many the hardest element to reconcile with the figure of the radical pioneer. Here, those who wanted to explain Eder in terms of a path of self-realisation could point to his racial origins. This reflected a still prevalent feeling, one which Eder and even Freud shared to a degree, that a full discovery of self included coming to terms with one’s ‘racial origins’.¹³⁵ Undoubtedly, his Jewish identity was important to his mystique and it is worth noting that he stood out among early British psychoanalysts in this respect.¹³⁶ However, Eder’s departure from Palestine, the allusions to the personal strain arising from dealing with the politics and practical problems of Palestine, and his decision to go into analysis and then to dedicate the rest of his life to work in this sphere all suggest something of a crisis in his personal and political life. In short, Eder’s immersion in Zionism after the First World War may have been the next step after socialism in a path of personal and political self-realisation, but it is once again difficult to resist reading this as another stage on an ultimate path towards psychoanalytic resolution.

This, of course, is an instance of how history, in trying to explain the complexities of a life, may be tempted to turn to psychobiographical explanation. In his contribution to Memoirs, psychoanalyst Edward Glover acknowledged that psychoanalysis was already adding considerably to the challenge of the biographer. Purely descriptive biography had fallen out of favour and had tended to result in whitewashing ‘panegyric’. The modern biographer, alert to the power of the unconscious, now tried to decipher action and to search for hidden skeletons in the manner of the psychoanalyst, but without training and therefore with mixed results. When psychoanalysts turned to biography they were equipped to delve deeper but often failed to satisfy when they emerged with a story of universal motivations in tension with an audience’s desire for the story of the individual life. Conscious of the pitfalls of such reductionism when it came to the broader biographical aims of a volume such as this, and without access to records of Eder’s analysis, Glover concentrated his own efforts on psychoanalytical explanations for Eder’s attraction to psychotherapy. For Glover, the primary gratifications for the psychoanalyst were akin to those of the parent, and in Eder’s case the role perhaps provided sublimation for impulses left unfulfilled by never having children of his own (also explaining his work with the poor as a socialist and Zionist). The other side of the drive to analysis was the analyst’s own sorting-through of mental conflicts. Here, the role of explorer of uncharted physical and mental landscapes, revolutionary and fighter was a playing-out of unresolved aggressive impulses until ultimately, in psychoanalysis, Eder had found ‘the solution to his own enigma’.¹³⁷ In short, Glover was arriving at a conclusion that was strikingly similar to other contributors to the memoirs. Looked at the other way round, might we argue that the general view of how to make sense of a life was becoming increasingly psychoanalytic by the 1930s; at the very least, the idea that a life needed to be explained ultimately in terms of the working-through of personality in response to the obstacles of life suffused the volume. In truth, there was a fundamental tension in Glover’s efforts to fit Eder’s life into a neat psychoanalytic frame; and he confessed as much. As with the narrative of the modern pioneer, psychoanalysis was attractive as offering narrative simplification and sense. But amidst evidence of such a rich and complex story, as Glover recognised, it covered up for inconsistencies, the impact of events, the complexity of personal relations, and the personal flaws that were left discretely out of the picture in an analysis that did more to cement than it did to unpick the image of the modern saint.

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No doubt, other politicians in this era were aware of, and to some degree influenced by, psychoanalysis. Recent work revising our idea of the impact of psychology in the period—more widespread, albeit eclectic than previously thought—makes this a difficult conclusion to resist, even if more work is necessary to prove it. But Eder was almost certainly the only leading British political figure of this period—as he was in Palestine—to have been equipped with the tools and insights of the psychoanalytic practitioner. There is no evidence yet that this mattered, though this is an intriguing possibility. Instead, Eder’s broader significance is that he points to trajectories from medicine to psychoanalysis, and then socialism, and perhaps from imperialism and Zionism to psychoanalysis, that deserve further attention in studies of the interplay between the medical, psychological and political cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

In pointing to such links, Eder’s story contributes to a reappraisal of the place of the psychoanalytic movement in early twentieth-century British culture. A broad body of recent work has made a case for questioning the idea that the import of Freud to Britain caused a fundamental rupture in a history of the self. We have come to appreciate the surfacing of aspects of this psychological modernity in Victorian explorations of psychic phenomena, in unorthodox areas of theology, and in areas of practice such as medicine, education and the culture of self-help. Eder is the figure within the psychoanalytic movement itself who provides us with the clearest evidence of such links to the earlier period. His interest in psychoanalysis emerged out of his ‘new life’ and Kropotkian socialism; his dissatisfaction with medicine; the clash between his private life and prevailing sexual standards; perhaps even in his search for meaning in the adventure of travel and its relationship to the search for a Jewish homeland. In short, he was an explorer of psychic liberation well before the encounter with Freud. Eder’s life also points to the development of psychoanalysis in relation to the practical social problems of the day. If he was the first to practise psychoanalysis in Britain, it was as a socialist in his treatment of working-class children. The history of the early psychoanalytic movement may have come to be characterised as one largely confined to a Bloomsbury élite, a battle of personalities, egos, and adherence to the strictures of a cult, and increasingly gloomy about the prognosis for civilisation, but Eder’s story points to its ongoing potential to take another route. Not only did his psychoanalysis emerge in response to the psychosexual trauma of the working-class child, but it would then be developed in relation to the horrors of the shell-shocked Tommy (and not just the officers), in the psychological hardships in the struggle to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and in realising the Kropotkian vision of treating the criminal. There were major hurdles in developing such roles for psychoanalysis—suspicion of its scientific basis, ongoing discomfort about its emphasis on sex and its focus on pathology rather than health, and the absence of funding and state support—but this social ambition was still an important part of the history of the early psychoanalytic movement in Britain. In that sense there is, one might suggest, a psychology behind Eder emerging as an attractive, even saintly, figure for us today, and not just for those who mourned him at the time.