Therafields: The Rise and Fall of Lea Hindley-Smith’s Psychoanalytic Commune

it.

1

CREATING CHARISMA

No path but the true path

should be taken. No road but the

holy road, the way. All other roads are

mistaken. When the true path is

taken, the way is clear, tho

the true path be not the near path

& the price be dear,

no path but the true path

should be taken. No road but

the holy road, the way. All other roads are

mistaken & when taken

lead to loneliness, lovelessness,

lead to emptiness, bitterness,

lead to nothingness, lead away.

from The Martyrology Book 9 bpNichol

I FIRST HEARD about Lea Hindley-Smith from Barrie Phillip Nichol—who would later become well known as the award-winning poet bpNichol—in the spring of 1964. While I was a student in philosophy at the University of Toronto in the late 1950s, I became clinically depressed. Working at the university library was a favourite holding pattern for students who were at a loss about how to continue their life, and I found sanctuary there. In the summer of 1963, Barrie arrived in Toronto from Vancouver to visit his brother Don and check out the poetry scene. Barrie had a contract to begin teaching primary school on the West Coast that fall. His architect brother Don was in therapy with Lea at the time, and he talked her into seeing Barrie for therapy over the summer. Lea foresaw that Barrie would break down and not be able to fulfill his commitment, so she advised him not to return to Vancouver. He did return, but could not complete the fall term.

Barrie was a young man of infectious energy, in love with making poetry. We took breaks and lunches together and bonded over our common interests. In May of 1964, I confided to Barrie how troubled I felt and that one of the few outlets I had available was psychoanalysis, an option that was far too expensive. Barrie said that he was seeing a psychoanalyst who charged little. I could scarcely believe my ears and asked him to find out if she would work with me.

Lea Hindley-Smith was in poor health at the time, but all the same agreed to see me every day except Sunday. We mostly did dream analysis, while I was in relaxation to facilitate free association. When I vacillated about continuing, fearing that therapy would subvert my individuality, Lea confronted me, saying that she had little time to go back and forth, and that I needed to choose whether I would get down to work or leave. She could be very maternal and accepting, but she could also rough you up, I was discovering. I was enraged, but it was now apparent that I needed her and that she did not need me.

Lea’s house on Brunswick Avenue was a three-storey semi-detached building with a large front porch. Since she did not have a receptionist, clients came right in and made themselves comfortable in the front room. The walls were covered with prints by van Gogh in heavily carved gilded frames, many of which were damaged. In an alcove in the hall at the base of the stairs leading to the second floor there was a large grandfather clock. For many clients, the pictures, the clock and a large red Buddha seemed fraught with significance, placed to elicit reactions, as if the environment was a psychological test.

Mrs. Smith, as she was called then, was a portly woman just over five feet tall, with thinning fine white hair worn in a bouffant style, possibly to give her more height. As a clinical uniform, she invariably wore loose satin artists’ smocks in various pastel colors. Her walk was surprising given her body shape and weight: It was as if she were walking lightly on her toes, in constantly fluid movement. Her lively expressive eyes reflected curiosity and humour. Her clearly and strongly enunciated words, pronounced with a highly inflected upper-class English accent, could carry drama and force. Some clients at first thought her bizarre, but they quickly felt both fully engaged and comfortable.

Once the client was greeted, led to her second floor office and given a seat, Lea became still, totally focused, intensely listening—businesslike. The sessions were mostly conducted face to face, unless the couch was used to facilitate dream associations or to use mild hypnosis. Her demeanour was kindly and even-tempered. In those days before answering machines, Lea took her phone calls even during sessions. One client was startled when Lea dealt sharply, insistently and aggressively over the phone with a failure to deliver goods. The contrast between her warmth and acceptance during the session and her forceful anger on the phone was shocking, but also filled the client with admiration. And when the call was over, Lea easily and readily returned to warmth and graciousness.

Lea did not rigorously observe therapeutic anonymity. The approved technique for analysts was to be a blank screen for the client. The office was supposed to be neutral, devoid of personal details such as references to family, values, political or religious affiliations or even aesthetic preferences. Lea described herself as a lay analyst, which was sui generis at the time in Toronto, when psychotherapy was not widely available. Her approach diverged from accepted conventions. She told stories as a catalyst, particularly when clients were depressed, or resistance to therapy left them mute and uncooperative. The stories would be from her life, the psychoanalytic literature or her clients. When she spoke about clients, her examples were sufficiently disguised that I could never pin a story to an individual. Examples from her own life threw light on her clients’ lives, and they got to know her better. On the whole, this created a feeling of closeness and warmth.

Visiting her home meant clients saw or heard other members of her family. For example, her older son often played his guitar on the porch or in the nearby park. Lea spoke of her pride in him, when he did so well at university, and had won a national mathematics competition. She spoke with pride about her daughter, too, who was a folk singer in England and would soon be returning home. She mentioned that her youngest son couldn’t be in high school because of his health, so she had arranged for the school board to pay for him to be tutored at home. Her husband Harry, with his Yorkshire accent so unlike her own, was frequently audible. Lea said he had done so well in England in the textile industry, but they had been misled by Canada immigration about opportunities in the trade, and he had not been able to get employment in his field. She indicated he was a great help to her as a handyman, able to do renovations on the house such as the group room he created in the basement. Lea inadvertently communicated a mixture of feelings about him, and seemed apologetic.

Both the storytelling that introduced clients to her history, and being privy to knowledge of her family, created a sense of inclusivity and security, but a precedent was set that grew stronger over time. The hortatory use of her life as a moral example, the involvement of clients with her family, and eventually the involvement of her family in her business—all would become dominant traits of the evolving scene. Although seemingly benign at the time, these elements could be seen as an underlying laxness—a lack of boundaries.

Lea and Harry had partly made their living in London and Toronto by running a rooming house in each place. In 1962 she proposed to clients that they live in such a house and use it for group therapy. She called it a house group. During the summer, Barrie told me about the house group he lived in located at 152 Howland. Lea had purchased a new house on Admiral Rd. in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. The Brunswick St. house Lea was living in would house a group of clients, and the present house group at Howland would continue, though with different people. When I asked Lea about the possibility of my living in one of the new house groups, she asked Barrie to show me around Howland. In retrospect, I realized that Lea had stretched herself to see me over the summer, while some of her clients were away, because she needed more clients for the new house groups and for the new non-residential groups she also planned.

Barrie and I arranged to meet after work in late July at the Howland house. Barrie was only there temporarily, and was waiting to move into a new house group. Sheila, a young and lovely Australian girl doing her walkabout through the rest of the world, worked with us at the library and had also temporarily moved into the house. Sheila and Barrie became romantically involved, thereby breaking a cardinal rule. There were four other members of the group temporarily attached to the already full house, so tensions were escalating. Up to three people had to share some rooms. Almost everyone was in their twenties, carrying all of the immaturity and explosiveness associated with that age.

When I arrived, Barrie came down to the door from an upstairs room and asked me to wait for him on a chair in the first-floor hall because he was involved in trying to calm down an upset house member. I could overhear a conversation between three other members in a room on the first floor, one of whom was frustrated and angry about his day at work. Then a drunk young man, who had recently been released from a psychiatric hospital and was being accommodated out of compassion, staggered down the steps to the landing between the first and second floor, just above where I was sitting. On the steps above him was an emotionally remote, beautiful young girl with a stilted, affected voice who ordered him to stop shouting, stop drinking and put down his bottle. He screamed obscenities at her and said that if she didn’t stop he would throw the bottle. She replied, Go ahead then, throw it. I thought to myself, This is not a good move, but then what did I know—maybe that’s what one did in therapy. I was grateful, at least, that someone seemed to be sane and in control. He screamed at her and threw it, shattering it against the wall. Ignoring me, the three men who’d been talking rushed out of their room and hustled the young man upstairs. Within minutes, Sheila, clearly drunk or on drugs, flew down the steps from the third floor, taking them two at a time, pursued by Barrie. She screamed that she would go to Yonge Street and find herself a man. I heard the screech of a car, and as I bolted for the door I saw her pick herself up and run off. Barrie apologized to me and said he was going to go to Yonge Street to try and stop her. Not knowing what to do, I sat in the hall for a bit and then followed them in the vain hope that I could help. Later that night, I concluded that living in a group home was a lot more exciting than my isolated rented room.

In September, Barrie and I moved into the new house group at 477 Brunswick, Lea’s old house, together with seven others. For two years I shared the front room, which had been Lea’s office, while Barrie shared the room behind it. He introduced us all to the Beatles and Bob Dylan as they blasted out of his system filling the house, while he composed poems. He also started publishing mimeographed magazines featuring the poetry of others. One year and many crises later Barrie’s relationship with Sheila ended. He was tempted to resume it, but Lea said if he did he would have to find another therapist. She had no intention of again going through the hard work to get him on his feet, and that if he wanted to do it again it would be conscious rather than unconscious masochism. Barrie desisted. Later still, he ruefully told me that when he went full of angst to see Lea for a session, she would often turn him around saying, All this is growing pains, Barrie. Go home and write! This was certainly not the response that I ever got, nor did most of her clients.

Lea idealized artists and the importance that artistic talent could have in psychological healing. I believe this originated in her heartbreak because her father in the asylum was not permitted to use his violin. I had the impression she felt this would have given him consolation, and perhaps some degree of healing. When I first met her, she talked of the importance to her of the letters between van Gogh and his brother Theo. She was convinced that she could have saved the life of van Gogh. She saw a role for the artist as channeling nonconformist energies and liberating society. Van Gogh’s paintings were everywhere in her home and office. Lea always referred to herself as a worker rather than as a psychotherapist. She claimed therapy was primarily an art and the true therapist was an artist. Perhaps this is reflected in the artist smocks she wore in the early ’60s, which originally were the peasant and working class coverall in the nineteenth century. She believed that if artistic gifts were dammed up, terrible self-destructiveness could be unleashed. The love and confidence that she gave to Barrie as an artist he then returned in kind to her, which bonded them to each other, and they were both richly rewarded. However, Lea’s confidence that her unconditional support for the gifts of her eldest son (and also, some years later, for her lover) would resolve the emotional conflicts within them, and cause them to blossom, was misplaced, and she was left with grief.

The most traumatic and formative event in the life of Lea Hindley-Smith was the breakdown into madness of her father in 1920, when she was eight years old, which resulted in his incarceration in a Welsh asylum for the rest of his life. When Lea was an infant, her mother, Sophia, left her husband, Philip, because of his gambling. Philip stayed at their home in Llanhilleth, where Lea was born, and Sophia went, together with her three children and her mother, Rachel, to her brother Nathan in Cardiff. Sophia’s mother died shortly after the move in 1913, and two years later Lea and her sister Hetty, who was three years older than her, contracted scarlet fever. Her sister died while Lea was left with a heart damaged by the illness. When her mother, Sophia, became ill and depressed because of the death of her daughter, Lea was returned to her father, Philip. Initially, she felt loved and was glad to be with him. Her mother struggled for a time but eventually returned to her husband. Their relationship over the next five years was full of conflict. Lea’s father had been treated brutally by his father and in turn was violent with his son, Sam, who was eight years older than Lea. Lea was terrified that he would kill the boy. Later in her life Lea described Philip as a murderer in the making and feared he had passed this disposition on to Sam. Faced with this abusive environment, Lea’s mother left her husband a second time, but remained in the town.

Soon after the separation Lea’s mother heard rumours that Philip was becoming more and more disturbed, and then that he had been admitted to the hospital for five days. Desperately frightened that her mad father would come looking for them, Lea fell into a deep depression and would no longer go outside to be with her friends. On a morning when she felt better and was out playing, she sensed someone watching her, even though her back was turned to the street. Turning quickly she saw her sad, mad father staring at her from across the street, unable to approach. Lea fled in terror. One of her father’s neighbours knocked at her mother’s door in the early morning a week later. They took your husband away last night. Yes, they came and took him last night. And dearie, oh dearie, how he screamed and screamed. The memory stayed etched in Lea’s mind: the breakfast dishes not cleared, her mother’s chair pushed back from the table, her hands still resting on it, her frightened eyes, her mouth open wide. Sophia became ill and the doctor feared for her life. Lea heard her say, If I go, what will become of Lea? Sophia didn’t die, but she was an invalid for many years, and a fear of abandonment became rooted in Lea, never to disappear. Philip died sixteen years later, in 1937, in the mental hospital called Pen-y-fal in Abergavenny, Wales. Lea was left with a feeling of guilt and helplessness toward her father. He had been alone and she’d run away. When Lea later ruminated on her act of betrayal, she connected this seminal trauma of her father’s madness with her running away when confronted with the possibility of breakdown in the significant men in her life.

What impressed most people on first meeting Lea was her uncanny ability to know what they were thinking and feeling. More than anything else, it was this quality that made her special. These abilities were latent and first showed up while she was still a child in Wales. For three years after her father went into the mental hospital, Lea hardly went to school. She was essentially an unparented child, left to her own devices. It was only the friendships with a few people that saved her from her suicidal thoughts. But these friendships also became a source of despair. In the summer of 1922, impoverished mining families suffered from influenza and tuberculosis and many of Lea’s childhood friends died at the tuberculosis sanatorium called Kevin Mabley.

In 1934, at the age of twenty-two, Lea left Wales for London. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and she had very little money—just an allowance to study and enough for modest housing. In Wales, Lea had modelled for a portraitist and so she devised a plan to become an artists’ model in London to supplement her allowance. Against the odds, she was successful. But she could never shake the fear that she had inherited her father’s madness, so Lea began psychoanalysis, focusing on the effect her father’s madness had had on her. It was while delving into this maelstrom of emotions that she met her first love, Ronald Butler, in January 1935.

Butler was thirty, more experienced than Lea, definite in what he wanted, and assertive with her. She was attracted to his cultured nature, but perhaps even more to his confidence, so unlike her father or the young men who had pursued her in Wales. Ronald was well-to-do so he could afford taxis, flowers and movies. They preferred musicals, from which he would emerge singing. He was jealous and possessive around Lea. As a very young and inexperienced woman in London, just beginning therapy, Lea was in a state of confusion about what sex or marriage might mean to her and to her studies in psychoanalysis. She was also afraid she could pass on her father’s madness to her future children. She and Butler fell out over her uncertainty at a meeting in Hyde Park in August, only eight months into their relationship. He was sick of her indecisiveness over marriage and disappointed that she offered him little more than an affair. He shouted at her and turned cold. Lea felt hatred in his eyes and saw his face grow bitter and angry. Two years later, on December 23, 1937, Lea met Ronald again, at a party. He was at first warm and tender but when they went outside his tenderness disappeared, replaced by his mad jealousy over the promiscuous life he assumed she now led. Butler became abusive, and as Lea looked into his face she was again filled with terror—afraid she was looking into the eyes of madness, as she had experienced with her father. Without thinking Lea ran recklessly into the street, disappeared into the Christmas crowd and in despair left London for her cousin’s house in the country. She would never see or hear of Butler again.

When Lea returned to London less than a week later, her landlady informed her that a man had been calling regularly, someone she had been dating intermittently for over a year. Lea’s relationship with Ronald had ended bitterly, and the ensuing depression only lifted when she met Harry Hindley-Smith in November 1935. He was lodging in the same house as a fellow model, a man whom Lea had come to visit. Harry’s light and amusing conversation could always get her laughing. As Lea described him, he was handsome, virile and alive with a face so young for a balding man. She felt warm toward him. Harry was slim, fit and, at five feet four inches, just slightly taller than Lea. He had a strong Yorkshire accent and an earthy manner of speaking. Harry had the cockiness of a man who had come a long way from his early, poor beginnings in Bradford. He had a good position, good prospects, good money and good friends. He easily made friends in the pubs he frequented because of his sense of humour, and because he played the piano. Lea was attracted to his intelligence, earthiness and humour, though Harry had no connection with the demimonde of artists, models and intellectuals, let alone the concepts of psychoanalysis. Harry looked up to Lea. Lea liked Harry but was not initially attracted to him. All the same, when she phoned him after getting back to London, she agreed to meet him for New Year’s Eve.

On December 31, Lea ran into a friend from her hometown in Wales who was younger and pregnant. Lea was suddenly smitten with the idea of motherhood—at the time it seemed more practical than striving for a career. She thought she would give anything to be in her young friend’s shoes. At twenty-five years, Lea was close to passing the customary age for marriage and children in 1937. Lea felt an intense euphoria steal over her—a euphoria which she later described as being stamped on the back of a coin called Despair. It was in this state that she went with Harry to the New Year’s Eve party, which finished at the Lyon’s Corner House on Oxford Street. Harry announced in front of his friends that he planned to be married in the new year. People asked, To whom? Why, to Lea, he said. Then he went over to her and proposed, How about it Lea? and she lightly accepted. Yes, it would be fun to be married, she said. On the face of it, Harry seemed like he would be a good father and their prospects together looked promising. This decision was made ten days after the death of her father. Lea married Harry Hindley-Smith on January 29, 1938, and they moved into a small flat in central London.

But soon Lea found she was running from one madness into another. Two weeks after her marriage, she awoke horrified and lost in a strange place, obsessed with thoughts of Ron. Hadn’t she wanted some success before she had children? Lea now felt she and poor Harry should never have married. She had betrayed her future children, and she would always feel guilty. The relationship with Harry had started on a false foundation since