Jessie Murray

Women's suffrage activism

Murray was a member of the Women's Freedom League, a militant organisation for women's suffrage, founded in 1907, which eschewed violence in favour of non-violent tactics; Turner was also a member, and one of Turner's two sisters was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union.

On Black Friday—18 November 1910—a suffragette demonstration of 300 women marchers was treated with violence, some of it sexual, by the Metropolitan Police and bystanders. Murray and the journalist Henry Brailsford collected 135 statements from demonstrators, nearly all of which described acts of violence against the women; 29 of the statements also included details of violence that included sexual indecency. Their findings were published and, in February 1911, their memorandum was presented to the Home Office, along with a formal request for a public inquiry. The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, refused to establish one.

From at least April 1910 Murray was a member of the Women's Tax Resistance League, a direct action organisation that used tax resistance to protest against the lack of votes for women. Murray hosted group meetings at her house and, in 1911, had property seized by bailiffs for non-payment of her taxes. She wrote on her demand "I, a member of the Tax Resistance League, hereby declare that I have conscientious objections to paying King's taxes so long as women are denied the suffrage. I maintain that taxation without representation is unconstitutional." Her debts were covered by the sale of a sideboard and chairs, although she refused to allow her property to be purchased back by her friends. In 1913 Murray donated 10s 6d to the Tax Resistance League; such funds were often used by the League to buy back seized property.

Medico-Psychological Clinic

From 1912 to 1914 Murray worked as a consulting physician at the Quinton Polyclinic, where they treated gastroenteritis in infants, eczema and other skin diseases by isotonised seawater. In 1913, while Murray was still consulting at the Polyclinic, she and Turner established the Medico-Psychological Clinic at 14 Endsleigh Street, London, where they both lived. The clinic was one of the first psychotherapeutic consultancies in Britain. Initially the clinic operated informally, opening only three afternoons a week, offering its services to those who could not afford an alternative; one of the clinic's aims was to provide treatment that could be afforded by middle-class patients.

The practice soon grew and in July 1914 the clinic moved to its own premises at 30 Brunswick Square, London, after they received a £500 donation from the writer May Sinclair. The clinic used a variety of psychiatric methods and disciplines at a time when psychological experimentation was booming; the clinic called its approach "orthopsychics". As psychology was underdeveloped as a science at the time, there was a focus on recruiting from those with a general education, rather than with specialist psychiatric training. From July 1915 the clinic began a training programme for psychotherapists by forming a sister organisation, the Society for the Study of Orthopsychics. This was the first course in England for training psychoanalysts. Part of the training included students having to undergo their own therapy, a requirement that was later adopted by the International Psychoanalytical Association.

The clinic initially focused on treating women patients, but as the First World War progressed they began admitting men too. In April 1917 the clinic expanded into a neighbouring house to provide an in-patient facility for rehabilitating soldiers suffering from shell shock. By 1919 a third adjacent house was occupied by the clinic. To raise funds to treat the increasing number of servicemen entering treatment, the clinic published a brochure, entitled "Special Appeal in Time of War", which described its approach:

... in providing certain newer forms of treatment, the utility of which in the kind of cases indicated has frequently been demonstrated, but which for lack of suitable conditions have so far only been accessible to a very limited number of sufferers. These forms of treatment are often referred to collectively as Psychotherapy and include the various forms of mental analysis, and re-synthesis which are known as Psychological Analysis (Janet, Morton Prince, &c.), Psycho-Analysis (Freud and Jung, &c.), and as Therapeutic Conversation and Persuasion (Dejerine, Dubois, &c.), Re-Education and Suggestion in the hypnoidal and hypnotic state.

Murray joined many of the professional networks associated with her field, and became a member of the British Medical Association, the Association of Registered Medical Women, the Psycho-Medical Society, the Medico-Psychological Association, the Royal Society of Medicine, the Society for Psychical Research, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) and the Psychological Society. She was an early member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology and spoke at the society's first quarterly meeting in January 1915 on "The Evolution of the Instincts".

Final years

In 1915 Murray met Marie Stopes, the pioneer in the field of family planning, at a BAAS meeting in Manchester, where both women presented papers. The two corresponded and attended the same medical meetings. In 1918 Stopes published her book Married Love, A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties; Murray wrote the preface, in which she states:

The age-long conflict between the "lower" and the "higher" impulses, between the primitive animal nature and the specifically human developments of an altruistic and ethical order, are fought afresh in each soul and in every marriage.

We need to realise more clearly that the lower is never—ought never to be—eliminated but rather subsumed by the higher. No true harmony can be hoped for so long as one factor or the other is ignored or repressed.

In July 1919 Murray was awarded an MD by the University of Durham. Her thesis was on "Nervous Functional Diseases from the Point of View of Modern Clinical Psychology", which, according to Valentine, "discussed the value of psychological discoveries in the treatment and prevention of nervous and mental diseases".

Soon after she was awarded her MD, Murray was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and retired from the clinic. Her position of co-director was taken by James Glover, who had joined the practice in 1918. He was medically trained and interested in psychoanalysis and had been rejected from military service because of his diabetes. Murray wrote her will in July 1919, leaving her estate to Turner, who was also named as the executrix. Murray died on 25 September 1920, aged 53; she was cremated, and her ashes buried in her mother's grave in Highgate Cemetery. Her obituary in The British Medical Journal described her as "a brilliant and many-sided personality". Her obituary in The Vote says "Such women can be ill-spared, but of them all it may be said, their works do follow them."

Impact

The Medico-Psychological Clinic was a pioneering organisation, according to The Institute of Psychoanalysis. The gender studies academic Grace Lavery considers the clinic to have been "an important British landing strip for psychoanalytic thought". Because of the training regime the clinic introduced with the Society for the Study of Orthopsychics, it influenced the next generation of psychoanalysts. Many students and staff became leading psychoanalysts and early members of the British Psychological Society and the Tavistock Clinic. They included Marjorie Brierley, Mary Chadwick, Edward Glover, Susan Isaacs, Barbara Low, Sylvia Payne, Joan Riviere, Nina Searl and Ella Freeman Sharpe.

The presence of James Glover (older brother to Edward) as a senior member of staff was part of the reason the clinic eventually closed down. In 1921 Glover travelled to Berlin for several months training and analysis with the German psychoanalyst Karl Abraham—a student and collaborator of Sigmund Freud. During his study he became a devotee of the Freudian school of analysis and returned to Britain determined to change the way the clinic was run. His brother Edward later described the "missionary zeal" with which his brother approached the task, banning any treatment except those on Freudian lines. The clinic had previously been run on non-partisan lines, using whichever discipline was deemed best for the patient, alongside medical treatment and changes in diet and exercise—although Murray, Turner and Sinclair had a personal preference for using Jungian analysis.

The feminist writer Elaine Showalter sees the closure of the clinic as "a striking illustration of the way that male professionalism could crush the early experimentation of women in psychoanalysis". Glover also tried to get the clinic allied with the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS) formed by Ernest Jones. Jones—also a follower of Freudian practices—was dismissive of the clinic and Murray, to the point that he was disingenuous in his description of the practice. He was also keen on closing it down; in 1920 he wrote to friends that the clinic had a "bad repute in the medical profession", and continued "all the therapists ... lay, ... [but] mostly women, and often badly neurotic women". Turner refused to join the BPS and the clinic split; Glover left with some of the staff and students.

By 1922 Turner closed the clinic. Many of those who had not followed Glover joined the Tavistock Clinic. The clinic's finances were also unsound at the time of the closure, and it had debts of over £1,000 when the controlling company was liquidated. The hostel for shell-shocked soldiers was a large drain on finances. There were no endowments or major sponsors to keep it running, and charitable funding after the war was scant.

After the closure of the clinic, Turner returned to her residence at Endsleigh Street and opened a practice. She published three books on psychology: The Psychology of Self-Consciousness (1923), The Dream and the Anxiety Hypothesis (1923) and Human Psychology as seen through the Dream (1924). The dedication in The Psychology of Self-Consciousness reads "To Jessie Margaret Murray M.D., B.S. (Durham) from whose inspired teaching and example is derived anything of value therein, this little book is dedicated." Turner died in 1946; her will closed with the words "It is my desire that my body be cremated and my ashes scattered upon the grave of my said dear friend Jessie Margaret Murray in Highgate Cemetery".