Pailthorpe, G W What We Put In Prison and In Preventive and Rescue Homes. 1932

Description: Pailthorpe, Grace Winifred. 1883-1971. What We Put In Prison And In Preventive And Rescue Homes. Williams and Norgate, 1932. 159 pages, errata leaf. Neat inscription on front blank endpaper. 19 x 13 cmA very good copy in a very good dust jacket, which is slightly darkened on the spine and edges. Grace Pailthorpe belonged to a generation of women who achieved much but have been forgotten, or little recognised, for their achievements. With the coming of the twenty first century her remarkable life is being re-discovered and re-evaluated. In her long career she, as a woman, was a pioneer in the worlds of medicine and surgery, especially in a military setting in the first World War. Following on from these experiences Pailthorpe made notable contributions and pioneered major breakthroughs in the worlds of psychology, criminology and art.Pailthorpe was born in Surrey, England, the daughter of a seamstress and a stockbroker. Grace was the only daughter of ten children and her parents were committed members of the Plymouth Brethren, a situation which led to what Grace described as an atmosphere of the ‘strictest puritanism’ at home.After an initial start at the Royal College of Music, in 1908 Grace decided to study at the London School of Medicine. When she qualified in 1914 she was one of only four women out of a class of 66 graduates. She tried to volunteer for war service but was rejected, because of her sex, at every hospital unit she tried to join‘Leaving the War Office, sadly, once more with the brutal way in which one’s sex was utilized by the ruling sex to domineer. I made my way to every hospital unit that I heard about asking to be allowed to “join up”. One after the other told me either that they weren’t taking women or, in the case of women’s hospitals that they already had a long list and they would add my name.’At the end of 1914 she sat her final exam in medicine and surgery but failed the oral section of surgery. She and some other students petitioned to re-sit exams earlier than usual because of the increased need for doctors during the war. She qualified as a doctor and surgeon in December 1914, aged 31.In January 1915 Grace Pailthorpe was working as a volunteer surgeon with the French Red Cross in the Bromley-Martin Hospital Unit which had been established 60 miles behind the front line. She worked alongside an eclectic volunteer staff which included writers John Masefield and Laurence Binyon, artists Wilfred de Glehn and Henry Tonks, pianist Madeline Bromley-Martin and opera singer Susan Strong.In France Grace Pailthorpe, who was fluent in French, encountered her first cases of shell shock and would also have come across the new subject of psychoanalysis, in which the French were world leaders. Grace may also have started experimenting with art therapy while working alongside the artists at the Bromley-Martin Hospital, and when she established the Amiens Club in October 1917, for soldiers on their way to and from the front, it is likely she adopted this therapy.The second half of 1916 saw Pailthorpe working as a surgeon in the Scottish Women’s Hospital at Salonika, with 200 beds under canvas. This service was followed by work in Malta and Italy before being posted to the Paris Military Hospital in 1917. In Malta it is likely she met Englishman David Eder, who was working at a hospital there as head of a neuro-psychological department. He was an early promoter of the theories of Sigmund Freud and possibly the first practicing psychoanalyst in London. In 1916 he published his paper ‘The Psychology of War Neurosis’, linking Freudian ideas to shell shock. He expanded these ideas the following year in his book ‘War Shock’. He became a member of what became known as the Integral Group, the most famous member being William Rivers, who at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, treated both Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. After the war Pailthorpe traveled to Australia where she worked, from 1919 to 1921, as a general practitioner, both in Western Australia and New Zealand, arriving back in London in February 1922. Her interest in psychology led to her study of female offenders at Birmingham Prison later in 1922. In the following years Pailthorpe researched juvenile delinquency and the usefulness of imprisonment. She advocated the exploration of the unconscious for young people caught up in the justice system. In Birmingham Prison she introduced art therapy as an aid to understanding offenders’ unconscious. After six months in Birmingham, because of the limited number of available participants, she transferred her study to Holloway Prison in London for which she received funding for five years. While engaged in this Pailthorpe also studied the female inhabitants of Preventive and Rescue Homes, which she regarded as recruiting grounds for prisons.Her book, What We Put in Prison, is the result of this work, based on detailed studies with 20 young women. Pailthorpe’s revolutionary thesis was that it is ‘just as necessary to enquire into the psychology of those who make laws as of those who break them.’ This book was finally published in 1932 after the delayed release of her preliminary report The Psychology of Delinquency: Studies in Prisons and in Preventive and Rescue Homes, which she had submitted to the authorities in April 1929.Grace Pailthorpe and David Eder became founding members, in 1931, of the Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals.’ Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung being both involved in the early years. This institution survives today as The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and publishes the British Journal of Criminology. In 1933 it established the Portman Clinic, to treat delinquent and criminal patients through psychoanalytic psychotherapyIn 1935 Pailthorpe met Reuben Mednikoff, 23 years her junior and a former art student, at a party in London and the relationship that developed between them, as they studied the therapeutic nature of surrealist Art in its relationship to psychotherapy, defined the rest of her life. They lived together, painted together, slept together and analysed each other’s minds and paintings. To many they became the public face of the Surrealist Art movement. They exhibited, to much critical acclaim, at the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936. Art critic Herbert Read compared them to William Blake and Lewis Carroll. Yet by 1940 internal disputes meant that they were expelled from the British Surrealist Group. Their detractors saw them as taking an overly scientific and therapeutic approach to the movement, which they saw as essentially an anarchic and subversive interpretation of society and an expression of irrational thought processes. Pailthorpe and Mednikoff spent the rest of the war in the USA and Canada, where they promoted what has become known a Psychorealism in art, returning to London in 1946. They worked at the Portman Clinic, which aimed to cure young delinquents through therapy, not punishment. They also ran a school of art therapy and became involved in occultism. In 1948 Pailthorpe adopted Mednikoff as her son and he changed his name to Richard Pailthorpe. Grace died in 1971, followed within months by Mednikoff. When the Hayward Gallery in London wanted to mount a Surrealist exhibition in 1978, they did not trace any of the couple’s works.By the late 1990s, however, rehabilitation and re-appraisal was underway. Tate director Andrew Wilson writes: ‘They were the only ones who scraped beneath the surface and dared to go full fathom deep. All the other Surrealists were mere decorators by comparison,’A joint retrospective with Reuben Mednikoff, Sluice Gates of the Mind was held in 1998 at Leeds Art Gallery. In 2019 a major exhibition and re-assessment, with accompanying catalogue, was held at two British locations: A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism at Bexhill-on-Sea and Camden Arts Centre.

Price: 2500 AUD

Location: Shellharbour NSW

End Time: 2024-11-26T06:12:32.000Z

Shipping Cost: 26.67 AUD