| E. Graham Howe | |
| Birth Name: | Eric Graham Howe |
| Birth Date: | 1897 2, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | London, England |
| Known For: | Eastern philosophy and psychotherapy[1] |
| Education: | St Thomas's Hospital Medical School (MBBS, DPM)[2] |
| Work Institutions: | Bethlem Royal Hospital Tavistock Clinic St Thomas' Hospital West Herts Hospital |
Eric Graham Howe (3 February 1897 – 8 June 1975) was a British psychiatrist notable for his early, interdisciplinary approach to psychotherapy in the 1930s, featuring elements of psychodynamic psychology, existential phenomenology, Eastern philosophy and Christian spirituality. After serving in World War I, he became interested in Sigmund Freud and decided to study psychiatry. Following medical school, he worked at the Tavistock Clinic in the 1920s and 1930s, and established the Open Way Clinic in the 1950s, later renamed the Langham Clinic. Towards the end of his life, he was known as a practicing Druid. He was the author of more than a dozen books and was influential among a number of writers and psychiatrists, including Israel Regardie, Jean Lucey Pratt, Alan Watts, Henry Miller, and R.D. Laing.
Born in London, to a family of twelve children, his unpublished autobiography, The Autobiography of an Unwanted Man, details much of his early life. He left secondary school and began working just before the age of 15 as an accounting clerk. After World War I broke out in 1914, he lied about his age so that he could enlist in the Artists Rifles regiment of the British Army Reserve, where he served for the next six years. After the first six months, he became a commissioned officer in India, reaching the rank of Major in just a few years. By the end of the war, he was deployed to Vladivostok as part of the Siberian intervention during the revolution, where he had learned the language. He returned home in 1920 and went to work for his brother in the shipping industry for several years. At some point he read the Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud (1924–1925), and decided to follow the same path as Freud. Although he never completed secondary school, he convinced the dean of St Thomas's Hospital to admit him conditional upon his passing a number of tests. Howe received his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery and a degree in medical psychology at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School (University of London) in 1927.[3]
Howe was an early founding member of the Tavistock Clinic (1928). He was also known as a supporter of the work of Carl Jung (1875–1961).[4] In 1935, Jung was invited by the Institute of Medical Psychology to give a lecture series at the clinic, which became known as the "London Seminars" or the "Tavistock Lectures". During the series, which occurred on five separate days from 30 September to 4 October, Howe and Jung got into a lively debate about the nature of intuition and other topics.[5] Howe's book, Morality and Reality (1934), was well received by reviewer M. Hamblin Smith in the Journal of Mental Science[6] and in the Postgraduate Medical Journal.[7]
After leaving Tavistock, Howe later established the Open Way Clinic (1953), which employed music therapy and art therapy, among other techniques.[8] It later became known as the Langham Clinic. Howe was a mentor to R. D. Laing (1927–1989), who became clinical director of Open Way from 1962 to 1965.[9] Richard W. Crocket positively reviewed Howe's book Cure or Heal? (1965) for the British Journal of Psychiatry.[10]
As the counterculture of the 1960s progressed, Howe sharply disagreed with Laing's use of LSD in psychedelic therapy and had him removed from the Langham Clinic in 1965.[3] Cooper et al. of the Philadelphia Association summarize Howe's position: "Although Laing did not take up the view that psychedelics should be used in psychiatry, Howe believed LSD could be dangerous, even a cheap con, and that Laing's interest in it was misplaced."[11] Psychologist Ian C. Edwards believes that Howe's opinion of psychedelics was informed by Jiddu Krishnamurti's strict, anti-psychedelic drug position, which viewed drugs as only making people comfortable, not truly free.[9]
In his later years, Howe was known for his practice of modern Druidry, and was said to conduct ceremonies in his barn at his property in Wales.[12] In the early 1970s, he wrote The Mind of a Druid (1973), just a few years before he died, with Henry Miller's "The Wisdom of the Heart" as a preface.[13] The work reached a wider audience with its posthumous publication by Skoob in 1989, adding a new foreword by David Loxley of The Druid Order.[14]
Occult nonfiction writer Israel Regardie (1907–1985) became friends with Howe in 1932, after an editor for the Saturday Review gave Regardie's second book, The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic (1932), a hostile, poor review. Howe responded to the bad review in the newspaper with his own positive, glowing review of Regardie's book, defending him and promoting the book. Gerald Suster believes this relationship led Regardie to pursue his study of psychology in the 1930s. Both Regardie and Howe became initiates of the Stella Matutina Hermes Temple in Bristol. In an unusual turn of events, Regardie would later become a critic of Howe's nephew, Ellic Howe, who made a career of publishing books about the Golden Dawn that Regardie felt were "anti-magic". Suster also notes that Gerard Noel, the co-founder of the Witchcraft Research Association, was an admirer of Howe, saying that "Everything I am today, I owe to him".[15]
Jean Lucey Pratt (1909–1986), famous for her Mass-Observation diaries, was a patient of Howe's during this time, becoming interested in his work after reading I and Me: A Study of the Self (1935). She wrote about him throughout her diary and continued to see Howe as a analyst for several decades.[16]
Writer Alan Watts (1915–1973), while attending The King's School, Canterbury in the late 1920s, decided upon modern history as his specialty, planning for a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford. He soon lost interest in modern history and began pursuing Eastern philosophy instead; his scholarship essay for Oxford was denied. Watt's family did not have the money to send him to college. Determined to continue his self-education, he sought out teachers on his own.[17] Watts pursued Howe to learn more, and although Watts was not a patient of Howe's, from 1936 to 1938, Howe was his self-appointed tutor in psychology. Watts described him as a "genial, dignified, and reassuring doctor".[18] He met with Howe for lunches and attended his weekly discussion groups, along with astronomer Richard Gregory, psychologist Philip Metman, Prince Leopold Loewenstein, and Frederic Spiegelberg. Howe invited Jiddu Krishnamurti to speak to the group in 1936, which profoundly influenced Watts.[17] Howe, along with Laing and Watts, were notable for their shared interest in the synthesis of Asian and Christian spirituality and practices.[19]
American writer Henry Miller (1891–1980), who was in Paris in 1939, read a copy of Howe's War Dance: A Study in the Psychology of War (1937). Howe's book so impressed Miller, he traveled to London to discuss it with Howe at his office. His influence on Miller led the author to publish an essay about Howe's ideas titled "The Wisdom of the Heart",[3] first publishing it in The Modern Mystic in April 1939, followed by its inclusion in The Fortune Anthology in 1940, and a book of essays by the same name in 1941.[20] Miller's essay brought Howe renewed attention in the United States, but little interest was shown in publishing his work abroad.[3]
Howe's refusal to join the British Psychoanalytical Society and his holistic, anti-systematic approach had serious repercussions for his career and reputation, with writers like Eric Trist all but ignoring him in historical works about the field, and his own work being dismissed by psychiatry as unscientific.[9] Historian Rhodri Hayward describes Howe as an "eclectic Freudian" and an "aristocratic theosophist and Honorary Physician" who "set up one of the first postgraduate psychotherapy courses for general practitioners" at Tavistock. Hayward notes that Howe was viewed at the time as an "eccentric...therapist who later defected to Buddhism and Druidism".[21] The Philadelphia Association described Howe as a "distinctly original voice within psychotherapy and psychiatry".[11] Writer Roberta Russell argues that Howe was uniquely responsible as the psychiatrist who "introduced Eastern philosophy to psychotherapy in England."[1]
Notes
References