Barbara Tholfsen on LinkedIn alerted me to this Ella Sharpe
Quotation from 1930 about the necessity of reading "three blind mice"
etc. if you want to be an analyst:.
"In any reading for analytical qualification I would make compulsory the following books:
Nursery Rhymes, the Alice books, Hunting of the Snark, Grimm, Andersen,
the Brer Rabbit books, Water Babies, Struwelpeter, Undine,
Rumpelstilzkin, Peter Ibbetson, Greek Myths and Tragedies, Shakespeare's
Plays.
Were I an arbiter of training, I should set an examination on those
books as a final test by which the would-be analyst should stand or
fall. My final examination for qualification would run on these lines:—
1. Quote in full a verse in which 'London Bridge is falling down' occurs.
2. Give briefly the story of three blind mice.
3. If the mice were blind, how came they to run after the farmer's wife
so purposely? Account for the cutting off of their tails.
Illustrate what unconscious drama is being staged when a patient thinks of himself as one of the blind mice.
What inference concerning the health of the ego do you draw from the
fact that the tails were cut off instead of the mice being killed?
Somewhere in that list of immortal stories we shall all find an
unconscious phantasy of our own. To understand even the tale of the
three blind mice is to have a conception of what those crystallized
terms id, ego and super-ego really mean in terms of the drama of life.
Faced by a cross-examination on children's nursery rhymes in terms of
psycho-analytical theory, with an application to the struggles going on
in ourselves or in our patients, would any of us do more than scramble
through it? To pass it creditably would mean that one had a good chance
of being a creditable technician."
Ella Freeman Sharpe "The Technique of Psychoanalysis " 1930
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?viewMemberFeed=&gid=55622&memberID=46776851
