ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a nineteenth-century spiritualist séance. It describes how the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was set up by a group of Cambridge dons to investigate spiritualist phenomena. Joan’s aunt Margaret, a lecturer in Classics at Newnham, was closely involved with the SPR and included Joan in some of her experiments. Joan’s uncle Arthur was described by James Strachey as having a mind like Freud’s. In fact the 1912 edition of the SPR Proceedings contained the first paper by Freud in English, which would have been Joan’s introduction to psychoanalysis. Margaret Verrall also provided a model of a married woman with a child who had a profession, not so usual at the end of the nineteenth century.
