The female malady women madness and engl 195

Hy

Male

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t

eria

183

Jung, Abraham, and Ferenczi, Rivers had a restless and adventurous

mind.

He had done

kinship and

He had

ethnological research in Melanesia, and his

social organization

book on

considered a classic in the

is still

participated in the neuropsychologist

field.

Henry Head's controver-

experiments on the nervous system, and the celebrated psycholog-

sial

laboratory he directed at Cambridge with Charles Myers trained a
number of students who later achieved prominence. 41
Rivers was also a teacher of legendary magnetism and charm. Arnold
Bennett, who met him through Sassoon after the war, described his
study at St. Johns College, crowded with devoted students:
ical

men who

His manner to young seekers after wisdom, and to young

were prepared
astride

to teach

on the sofa and

were touching,

in the

him

a thing or two,

was

divine.

I

have

listened to dozens of these interviews.

eager crudity of the

visitors, the

sat

They

mature, suave,

wide-sweeping sagacity and experience of the Director of Studies,
and the fallacious but charming equality which the elder established
and maintained between the two. 42

When

Sassoon met him, Rivers was

fifty-three.

Many

of his friends

was not really until the war that Rivers found himself"; that
through his work in treating psychoneuroses he achieved an emotional
felt

that "it

fulfillment that

bridge,

had been missing

and even

in his

stammerer since boyhood,
and isolated

in his laboratory research at

teaching and anthropological

He

thought he had "almost no interest

women." 44

in

in dealing

shocked

own

he drew on his

Bennett

for

one

Rivers's biographer,

with the suffering of shell-

suppressed emotions of love and

nurturance.

A

combination of experience, life-view, and manner made Rivers a

source of

wisdom and

security to

many

shattered

young men

in the

years 1915-19. Langdon-Brown, a wise and compassionate doctor
himself,

felt

that this success

was possible "because he had

himself that he could heal others";
that in healing others, Rivers

himself. 45

A

never married, and although his

Richard Slobodin, suggests that
officers,

Cam-

work. 43

Sassoon, Rivers was reserved, lonely,

like

in his private life.

towards coeducation were progressive,

attitudes

field

went

it

to heal

might be suggested, conversely,

far

toward healing, that

is,

helping