Susan Isaacs

The biography published by the Melanie Klein Trust gives her birth as 24 May 1885, near Bolton in Lancashire. Steiner's entry in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis gives 24 March instead. She was the second-youngest of eight children of William Fairhurst, a saddler who became a local journalist and Methodist lay preacher, and Miriam Sutherland. Her mother died when Susan was six. As a teenager she declared herself an agnostic and a socialist, and her father took her out of school. She later took her mother's surname, Sutherland.

At twenty-three she entered the University of Manchester on a two-year course, moved into honours philosophy and graduated with a first. She went on to research children's psychology at Newnham College, Cambridge. She then taught at Darlington Training College and lectured in logic at Manchester. In 1914 she married the botanist William Brierley and moved to London. They separated in 1918, and after their divorce in 1922 she married Nathan Isaacs, a metal merchant. She had met him while teaching a Workers' Educational Association class, and he later wrote the appendix on children's "why" questions in Intellectual Growth in Young Children². Until 1933 she was also a tutor in psychology at the University of London.

The sources tell her psychoanalytic training differently. The Melanie Klein Trust dates a brief treatment with Flügel to 1920. After it she went to Vienna hoping to be analysed by Sigmund Freud, and had three months of analysis with Otto Rank instead. The Psychoanalytikerinnen lexicon places the analysis with Rank in Berlin, before the one with Flügel. The sources agree that she then had a more formal analysis with Joan Riviere. Steiner and the Psychoanalytikerinnen lexicon date it from 1922; other accounts place it after Klein settled in London in 1926. Isaacs dedicated Social Development in Young Children³ to Riviere, "who has taught me to understand my own childhood". She became an associate member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1921 and a full member in 1923. That year she published her first psychoanalytic paper, on sex differences, and began to see adult and child patients. The Klein Trust says she completed her formal training in 1938.

The Malting House School in Cambridge was founded and paid for by Geoffrey and Margaret Pyke, and Isaacs was its first principal. Her records run from October 1924 to Christmas 1927. The school opened with ten boys aged between two and nearly five. By its last term it had twenty children aged two to eight, from professional families and with a mean mental ratio of 131 (Intellectual Growth in Young Children²). The staff were to provoke the children's own inquiry rather than instruct them, and to bring the real world within their direct experience, an aim Isaacs related to John Dewey. Freedom had limits. The staff stepped in where safety required, kept a framework of routine, and did not allow bullying of weaker or younger children or any cruelty to animals. Isaacs had met Klein on Klein's first visit to Britain in 1925, and Klein visited the school in its first year. According to the historian Michal Shapira, its rules were changed on her advice, since she held that complete freedom was too frightening for young children. Piaget also visited. The school closed after Pyke went bankrupt in 1929.

From 1929 to 1936 Isaacs answered readers' letters in the weekly Nursery World as Ursula Wise, writing about 3,000 words a week. Shapira found that most of the letters came from mothers rather than nurses. Her book for parents, The Nursery Years⁵ (1929), presented play as the child's work and held that the infant has an emotional life from birth. By Shapira's count it had been reprinted nineteen times and had sold about 100,000 copies by 1971.

In 1933 she became head of the new Department of Child Development at the Institute of Education of the University of London. In the Klein Trust's account, the department had an international reputation within six years. Breast cancer was diagnosed in 1935, and she went on teaching and writing through further treatment. During the Second World War she directed a survey of evacuated children in Cambridge, which she edited as The Cambridge Evacuation Survey (1941), and Klein lived with her there for a time. She sat on the Training Committee of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1944–45. In 1948 she was made a CBE for services to education, and she published Childhood and After and a collection of her Ursula Wise columns. She died in London on 12 October 1948. John Rickman wrote her obituary in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.

An Introduction to Psychology¹ was written, its preface says, "to meet the first needs of non-professional students of psychology", especially those in Workers' Educational Association classes. It aimed to present a point of view in harmony with a biological outlook. Following William McDougall, Isaacs took psychology to be the study of behaviour, understood as purposive activity. She accepted the findings of John B. Watson's behaviourism but rejected a psychology without consciousness. The book's last chapter, on the conscious and the unconscious, describes the unconscious as made up of wishes that have undergone repression. The conflict that leads to repression looks like one between the child's desires and the world outside. From the first, she argues, it is an internal conflict, since the child's own dependence and urge to imitate give adults their power over it. Of the ways out of such conflict she ranks sublimation above reaction formation. She also reports the Freudian view that the content of the unconscious is mainly infantile sexuality.

Intellectual Growth in Young Children² argues for qualitative records of children's spontaneous activity over set tests and interviews. It insists that an adult is never a neutral presence: "It is not what we are to ourselves and in our own intention that matters; but what the children make of us." For Isaacs the child's world is a dramatic one, and "make-believe may at any moment slip over into genuine inquiry". She distinguishes thought from phantasy without setting them against each other. The egocentrism of the little child, she argues, is an affair of feeling and phantasy rather than of thought. Development is a progressive penetration of feeling and phantasy by experience, and "the young child as such is no more a psychotic than he is a savage". She cites Klein's play technique for the symbolic meaning that engines, fire, water and animals have for children, which feeds their interest in the real world.

The book's third chapter sets these records against Jean Piaget. Isaacs counts his work among the most significant of the time. She argues, though, that he puts down to maturation what is partly the effect of experience, and that her records give positive evidence against his negative findings. In place of fixed stages she describes a continuous process of socialisation, in which different levels of functioning coexist. She also criticises his clinical method. A child does not yet have a firm body of knowledge to hold on to, so an adult's questions can push it below everyday practical reasoning into the deeper layers of magic and phantasy. In her phrase, "Piaget is digging deeper than he realises". She notes as well that he says little about the mental ratio of the children he studied, though she suspects that question may be irrelevant.

Social Development in Young Children³ draws on thirty-one children over three and a quarter years, and on more than 420 letters from mothers and nurses. It keeps the psychological data and the educational problem in separate parts. The records fall into two divisions. The first covers social relations as love and hate in action: primary egocentric attitudes; hostility and aggression; and friendliness and co-operation. Hostility is either individual, driven by possession, power, rivalry or feelings of inferiority, or that of a group towards newcomers, adults or a temporary scapegoat. The second division covers the deeper sources of love and hate: sexuality, guilt and shame, and the record of one child. To the young child other children are "mainly rivals for the love and approval of adults", and much of their hostility is "due to projected guilt". It is "to the family rather than to the herd" that Isaacs looks to understand human social life. She calls Klein "the pioneer" of child analysis and draws on The Psycho-Analysis of Children⁶, which appeared just before her own book went to press. Yet she holds that analysis and education are distinct tasks, and that knowledge of the unconscious as such is of limited direct use to the practical educator. She denies that the Malting House was a psychoanalytic school and names Dewey as her inspiration. She argues that it is false that the young child learns best by corporal punishment, and that milder methods of training lessen the grip of guilt, though they cannot remove it.

The Controversial Discussions of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, in the early 1940s, turned on one question: were the views of Klein and her followers compatible with psychoanalysis as Anna Freud and her colleagues from Vienna and Berlin understood it? According to Steiner, Klein chose Isaacs to give the first scientific paper for her clear theoretical mind and her academic background in psychology, logic and education. "The Nature and Function of Phantasy" was read on 27 January 1943. It was the first of four Kleinian papers put before a committee of Edward Glover, Marjorie Brierley and James Strachey, chaired by Ernest Jones. The third paper, "On Regression", was given by Isaacs and Paula Heimann on 17 December 1943.

In The Nature and Function of Phantasy⁷ Isaacs widened Freud's notion of unconscious phantasy, spelling it with "ph" to mark its unconscious character. Phantasy is the mental expression of the instincts: "There is no impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy." In a break with Freudian tradition, she held that phantasy is present from the beginning of life. It arises from the earliest bodily experience and works as a primitive form of thinking, out of which object relations, language and self-awareness grow. External reality is taken into phantasy step by step, but phantasy's source stays in the impulses, and it expresses psychic reality rather than simple wish-fulfilment. She distinguished the abstract mechanism of introjection from the phantasy of incorporating an object, the phantasy being the way the mechanism is lived. She described the transference as "almost entirely a construct of unconscious phantasy", so that its changes in the session let the analyst read the patient's phantasies. Steiner adds that she tried, where she could, to link these ideas to academic psychology and epistemology.

An abridged version of the paper appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1948. It was reprinted in Developments in Psycho-Analysis⁴ (1952), the Kleinian group's book, edited by Riviere with a preface by Jones. The book also contains papers by Klein, Heimann and Riviere, and the chapter on regression that Isaacs wrote with Heimann.

Steiner writes that the Malting House books were "immediately acknowledged as a new way of looking at the development of children", and that they influenced Piaget himself. He also credits the Ursula Wise columns, which drew mainly on Klein, with changing how children in Britain were brought up. Shapira's 2017 study of the columns describes Isaacs teaching her readers to "speak Kleinian" by putting Klein's ideas into ordinary language. The columns also opposed the behaviourist and punitive methods of John Watson and Truby King. Shapira concludes that Isaacs was "an essential link between expert theories and popular child-rearing culture". The Melanie Klein Trust writes that in her lifetime she was admired for her intellectual gifts and excelled as a writer and teacher.

Within psychoanalysis, Steiner calls her theoretical contributions fundamental to the Controversial Discussions, and the Melanie Klein Trust calls the phantasy paper a pivotal contribution to them. The Kleinian positions she set out were contested by Anna Freud's group, which Steiner says Glover joined as one of Klein's fiercest critics. In Steiner's account, the Discussions ended in a compromise that kept the Society together as three groups: Freudians, Kleinians and Independents.

Thomas Ogden gave the paper a close reading, published in 2011 and collected in Creative Readings⁸ (2012). He argues that it contributes to a radically revised psychoanalytic theory of thinking. Perhaps her most important idea, in his reading, is that phantasy is the process that creates meaning: all meanings in unconscious life exist as phantasy, whether feelings, impulses, defences or bodily experiences. Ogden extends her ideas in three ways. He treats phantasying as the whole of unconscious thinking. He treats the transference as a form of phantasying, in which past emotional events too disturbing to be experienced at the time are thought for the first time. And he holds that phantasy serves a need to know the truth of one's experience. He relates her concept to Wilfred Bion's alpha function, and contrasts it with Ronald Fairbairn's view of unconscious internal object relationships.

Her books include An Introduction to Psychology¹ (1921, as Susan S. Brierley), The Nursery Years⁵ (1929), The Biological Interests of Young Children (1929), Intellectual Growth in Young Children² (1930, with an appendix by Nathan Isaacs), The Children We Teach (1932), Social Development in Young Children³ (1933), The Psychological Aspects of Child Development (1935), The Cambridge Evacuation Survey (as editor, 1941) and Childhood and After (1948). Her main psychoanalytic paper is The Nature and Function of Phantasy⁷ (read 1943, published 1948). It was reprinted in Developments in Psycho-Analysis⁴ (1952), with her chapter on regression written with Heimann.