Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

The Story of A Mental Hospital

by David Clark

Acknowledgements

I started writing my book about Fulbourn Hospital in the 1950s and I have been revising it ever since. The number of people I might thank is therefore legion; so I must limit myself to a few.

My first thanks must go to the patients of Fulbourn Hospital, who taught me so much over 30 years, especially the long-term stormy people whom I met first on the ‘disturbed wards’ and later in Hereward House, Westerlands and Burnet House. A few of their tales are told in the text but most of them must remain anonymous. My debt to them is immense.

Thanks also to the long-time staff of Fulbourn Hospital – nurses, ward orderlies, assistant nurses – who worked with me over the years, especially in the therapeutic communities and who gradually and cautiously (‘never tell the truth to an officer’) came to trust me and share the pains and anxieties of opening their minds and feelings to the deeply disturbed. I have attempted to tell something of their devotion to their work and their courage in changing from the traditional custodial pattern.

I must thank too my more senior colleagues, many of them mentioned in the text – senior nurses Queenie Brock, Jack Long, Morris Fenn – nursing officers Ruby Mungovan, John Wise, Eric Raines, Larry Nicholas and others – who worked with me so happily over the years. The senior doctors – Beresford Davies, Bernard Zeitlyn, Malcolm Heron, Oliver Hodgson and Ross Mitchell – who were all such good comrades in many battles. They were tolerant of my excesses, my exuberance and garrulity – and even forgiving of some of my faults.

I am also grateful to those colleagues who took time to work with me on various Social Therapy projects over the years – Fred Houston, Douglas Hooper, Eddie Oram, Ken Myers, David Towell, Clive Harries and Geoff Shepherd. Our joint publications stand or fall on their own merits but I am grateful to them for all the long hours of discussion and sharing of ideas which forced me to clarify many of my more woolly notions.

In the preparing of this book there are many to thank. I am grateful to the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California for that wonderful year 1962–63 which let me learn how to write a book, enabled me to complete ‘Administrative Therapy’ and stimulated me to produce the first draft of this book.

I am grateful to the editors who have commented on drafts and taught me something of the art of turning ideas and rhetoric into books – John Harvard Watts, Neil Middleton, Malcolm Pines – and for this last effort, Bob Young. He persisted in seeing virtue in the project when I was ready to give up and I am in his debt. Carol Schaessens did a fine task in bringing the manuscript into greater order.

The endless task of typing draft after draft was borne by two colleagues and friends: Graham Copeman with the earlier drafts and for the last 20 years Julie Aston, who has seen the book through to this, the last of many drafts.

Finally my thanks as always go to my wife Margaret who has supported me over this last decade of writing, rewriting and reformulating and sustained me through those low periods when I felt like giving up all the toil and strain, dropping the project and taking to the softer pleasures of the retired life.