Tribute by Margot Waddell at Arthur Hyatt Williams' memorial service
at the Tavistock Clinic:
All foregathered here will have come for very personal as well as professional
reasons – having learned from, perhaps been touched, enriched,
certainly affected by the marvellous warmth, ebullience, courage and
wisdom that they will have variously encountered at different points
of the long working life of Arthur Hyatt Williams.
I, too, am here for both personal and, given that this is an Adolescent Department tribute, professional reasons having, in the early 70's, attended some remarkable lectures of his on the nature of the adolescent state of mind. His clarity and sense of purpose impressed me greatly and, among other influences, lie at the heart of my own subsequent struggles to think about the specificity of adolescence and its potential value in the growth of the personality – however apparently problematic and recalcitrant those years can be.
In the mid-70's I had the good fortune to be part of what was called the Individual Psychotherapy Workshop in the Department, chaired by Gianna and Hyatt. This Workshop was truly a thinking place, Hyatt was in his prime and the multi-disciplinary discussions held there became a springboard for much original work that followed: work, for example, on narcissism and, what Gianna termed, "unholy internal and external alliances".
But something else also had a huge impact – a something on the basis of which Gianna wanted me to speak today – so … I am very honoured to do so. We have all heard, and read of Hyatt's love of nature, his fascination for moths and butterflies in particular, for growth in all its multifold forms, be they for nourishment, or floral beauty. It was clear to me from wanders around various gardens and vegetable patches with him, or from a long walk in the Suffolk fields one memorable summer afternoon, how deeply sustaining to him was this passion for natural beauty and its lifecycle of birth, maturing, death and renewal.
There was also another source of deep sustenance though, and that was his love of literature, especially English Romantic poetry. To my youthful astonishment, this I also encountered in my early student days in the Adolescent Department Common Room, when the esteemed Department Chair, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, Dr Arthur Hyatt Williams no less, would often suddenly break out into poetry, mining his vast internal storeroom of poetic resources which he, like Bion, could draw on at will. Of the many casual recitations that I overhead in that setting, I remember the richness of his knowledge of Keats in particular. His allusion to the "wreath'd trellis of a working brain" in the "Ode to Psyche" has always stayed with me.
It is, of course, ultimately impossible to know why this or that poet speaks so directly and searingly to different people, but it is surely not surprising that this Keatsian paean to the power of love, to the centrality of emotion to the growth of the mind, would make so great an impression upon Hyatt.
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines will murmur in the wind:
- So powerful a metaphor for all ordinary human development.
During the 60's, Hyatt wrote some informal reflections on Keats's "La
Belle Dame Sans Merci" and on Coleridge's "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner", entitled, in the only published volume in French,
"Poetry and Psychoanalysis: Essays on Conflict and Culpability".
In 1986 he enlarged on his work on Coleridge in the Journal Free Associations
– "'The Ancient Mariner': Opium, the saboteur of self-therapy".
Gianna lent me an English manuscript of the original thoughts on both
the poems which I found fascinating to re-visit. I shall briefly talk
about these pieces not so much from a literary point of view, but in
relation to some themes which so often recur and obviously spoke to
Hyatt very penetratingly.
As Meg Harris Williams, his daughter-in-law, says in her introduction
to that French edition, Bion had referred to the English Romantic poets
as "the first psychoanalysts". This notion seemed to resonate
with Hyatt as he found in these two great poetic ballads in particular,
perhaps some kind of psychic correlate between the primitive struggles
between life and death instincts in the human mind and those fundamental
cycles of physical life, death and renewal to which he was so drawn
in the natural world. Here, rightly or wrongly, but always compellingly,
he infuses his understanding of the poems with his own medical knowledge
of the mind-changing impact of, in Keats's case, pulmonary tuberculosis,
and in Coleridge's of drug addiction. His thinking is also, of course,
infused with psychoanalytic knowledge of Klein and of the "internal
saboteur" alluded to by Bion, and, of course, his own work on the
dynamics of the murderous mind, whether self- or other- directed. This
combination of medical expertise, psychological understanding, poetic
appreciation and, one feels, deep atunement with an intensity of depressive
as well as remorseful and reparative psychological states, for me, at
least, provokes an acute awareness of the more contemporary notion of
the containing function of art – whether for the two poets themselves,
or for Hyatt as critical appreciator.
The ballad form, as he shows, is perfectly suited to a mesmeric, mysterious and musical rendition of some of the most early, enduring, infantile conflicts of the human spirit; to the compelling allure of some all-encompassing and enchanting object of devotion, and the desperateness of any disillusionment of a kind that can arouse intense, senseless destructiveness when a person actually, or metaphorically, awakens – be that from the night terror sweats of serious illness; or from opium-fuelled enthrallment to pervasive infantile dream images and visions; or, indeed, from the persecutory grip of a deluded mind. These ballads are mythic renditions of great suffering, of human torment, of loss, grief, guilt, loneliness, fear, destructiveness and, also, though only to a degree, of reparation, redemption and expiation - if only through the artistic expression of the poems themselves and the shapes, at least, of recovery expressed through them. For, at root the poems are about a feared crisis in poetic creativity, and, as such, were matters of psychic survival itself. Hyatt's biographical research lends credence to this aspect of two such haunting and elusive works. Perhaps the facts, for him, anchored the otherwise scarcely bearable states of mind – some of those same extreme states being ones with which he spent so much of his adult life engaging.
His impressively wide cultural and professional span and the rich inter-action between all the areas of his life and mind just mentioned are unusual these days and must always have been difficult to maintain. I feel, somehow, that Hyatt belonged to a band of great warriors, those fighting for the preservation of the highest and deepest forms of understanding in the lives of everyone – however delinquent, psychotic, destructive, murderous, borderline we may at times be. This is a matter of bearing such extremities in oneself as well as in others, of holding them and of maintaining hope throughout.
That said, I shall end with some lines from another ballad, which he must surely have known – Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" – another Arthur, Arthur the King, as he comforts his last remaining knight, Sir Bedivere, who has now recounted the way in which the arm, "Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful" finally rose from the mere to re-claim Arthur's sword Excalibur, and therewith, his life:
"The old order changeth", he slowly answered, "yielding
place to new.
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?"
That is – the burden is now yours, and you must take it on.
For us, the old order is certainly changing, but Hyatt's work and passionate interests will surely be internally preserved and carried forward, thanks to all we have appreciated in him and learned from him.