52045

Download the full version of the ebook at
https://ebookultra.com
Playing with Dynamite A Personal Approach to

the Psychoanalytic Understanding of
Perversions Violence and Criminality 1st
Edition Estela V. Welldon
https://ebookultra.com/download/playing-with-
dynamite-a-personal-approach-to-the-
psychoanalytic-understanding-of-perversions-
violence-and-criminality-1st-edition-estela-v-
welldon/
Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookultra.com

Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.
New Horizons in Forensic Psychotherapy Exploring the Work

of Estela V Welldon 1st Edition Brett Kahr
https://ebookultra.com/download/new-horizons-in-forensic-
psychotherapy-exploring-the-work-of-estela-v-welldon-1st-edition-
brett-kahr/
ebookultra.com
Dynamite The Story of Class Violence In America Louis

Adamic
https://ebookultra.com/download/dynamite-the-story-of-class-violence-
in-america-louis-adamic/
ebookultra.com
Playing the Unconscious Psychoanalytic Interviews with

Children Using Winnicott s Squiggle Technique 1st Edition
Michael Günter
https://ebookultra.com/download/playing-the-unconscious-
psychoanalytic-interviews-with-children-using-winnicott-s-squiggle-
technique-1st-edition-michael-gunter/
ebookultra.com
The Craft of Piano Playing A New Approach to Piano

Technique Feldenkrais based 2nd Edition Edition Alan
Fraser
https://ebookultra.com/download/the-craft-of-piano-playing-a-new-
approach-to-piano-technique-feldenkrais-based-2nd-edition-edition-
alan-fraser/
ebookultra.com
A Guide to Understanding Land Surveys 3rd Edition Stephen
V. Estopinal
https://ebookultra.com/download/a-guide-to-understanding-land-
surveys-3rd-edition-stephen-v-estopinal/
ebookultra.com
Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique A Lacanian

Approach for Practitioners 1st Edition Bruce Fink
https://ebookultra.com/download/fundamentals-of-psychoanalytic-
technique-a-lacanian-approach-for-practitioners-1st-edition-bruce-
fink/
ebookultra.com
The Origins of Unhappiness A New Understanding of Personal

Distress 2nd Edition David Smail
https://ebookultra.com/download/the-origins-of-unhappiness-a-new-
understanding-of-personal-distress-2nd-edition-david-smail/
ebookultra.com
Dictionary of Russian Personal Names With a Guide to

Stress and Morphology Morton Benson
https://ebookultra.com/download/dictionary-of-russian-personal-names-
with-a-guide-to-stress-and-morphology-morton-benson/
ebookultra.com
Playing Hard at Life A Relational Approach to Treating

Multiply Traumatized Adolescents 1st Edition Etty Cohen
https://ebookultra.com/download/playing-hard-at-life-a-relational-
approach-to-treating-multiply-traumatized-adolescents-1st-edition-
etty-cohen/
ebookultra.com
Playing with Dynamite A Personal Approach to the
Psychoanalytic Understanding of Perversions Violence
and Criminality 1st Edition Estela V. Welldon Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Estela V. Welldon
ISBN(s): 9781855757424, 1855757427
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.03 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english
PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE
Other titles in the
Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series
Violence: A Public Health Menace and a Public Health Approach

Edited by Sandra L. Bloom
Life within Hidden Walls: Psychotherapy in Prisons
Edited by Jessica Williams Saunders
Forensic Psychotherapy and Psychopathology:
Winnicottian Perspectives
Edited by Brett Kahr
Dangerous Patients: A Psychodynamic Approach to Risk Assessment
and Management
Edited by Ronald Doctor
Anxiety at 35,000 Feet: An Introduction to Clinical Aerospace Psychology
Robert Bor
The Mind of the Paedophile: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
Edited by Charles W. Socarides
Violent Adolescents: Understanding the Destructive Impulse
Lynn Greenwood
Violence in Children: Understanding and Helping Those Who Harm
Edited by Rosemary Campher
Murder: A Psychotherapeutic Investigation
Edited by Ronald Doctor
Psychic Assaults and Frightened Clinicians
Edited by John Gordon & Gabriel Kirtchuk
Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder
Edited by Adah Sachs & Graeme Galton
PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE
A Personal Approach
to the Psychoanalytic Understanding of
Perversions, Violence, and Criminality
Estela V. Welldon
Forewords by
R. Horacio Etchegoyen, Brett Kahr,
& Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC
Introduction by
James Gilligan
Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series

Series Editor Honorary Consultant
Brett Kahr Estela V. Welldon
First published 2011 by Karnac Books Ltd.
Published 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2011 by Estela V. Welldon

The rights of Estela V. Welldon to be identified as the author of this work
have been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781855757424 (pbk)

Edited, designed, and produced by Communication Crafts
To all my students from the "Golden Decade"—
from 1990 when the Course on Forensic Psychotherapy was
founded to 2000 before my retirement.
These students have become this country’s
most accomplished clinicians, academicians, writers,
and researchers in this, the most difficult field
of psychiatric endeavours.
Most of them have been responsible
for the growth and expansion of the
International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy,
adding to the collective wisdom of practitioners everywhere.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
SERIES FOREWORD
Brett Kahr xiii
FOREWORDS
R. Horacio Etchegoyen xvii
Brett Kahr xx
Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC xxiii
INTRODUCTION
James Gilligan xxv
An interview with Estela V. Welldon, July 1996 1
CHAPTER ONE
The true nature of perversions 25
CHAPTER TWO
Perverse transference and the malignant bonding 50
CHAPTER THREE
Babies as transitional objects:
another manifestation of perverted motherhood 60
vii
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER FOUR
Is Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
another case of female perversion? 67
CHAPTER FIVE
Bodies across generations and cycles of abuse 71
CHAPTER SIX
Children who witness domestic violence: what future? 84
An interview with Estela V. Welldon, July 1999 98
CHAPTER SEVEN
The unique contribution of group analytic psychotherapy
for victims and perpetrators of incest 108
CHAPTER EIGHT
Introduction to forensic psychotherapy 139
CHAPTER NINE
From the court to the couch 191
CHAPTER TEN
The Portman Clinic and the IAFP 240
An interview with Estela V. Welldon, November 2010 252
REFERENCES 263
INDEX 275
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have learned much from my teachers and senior colleagues in the

field, my many contemporaries, patients, students, and friends.
I had the good fortune to study with, or to be influenced directly
by, several historic figures in the fields of psychiatry, psychoanal-
ysis, and psychotherapy, especially: Luisa Alvarez de Toledo, Horacio
Etchegoyen, Adam Limentani, Joyce McDougall, Karl Menninger, Paco
Perez Morales, Enrique Pichon-Rivière, Janine Puget, Salomon Resnik,
Ismond Rosen, and Buby Usandivaras. I am indebted to the medical
school at the University of Cuyo in Argentina, where I studied medi-
cine for free; this training would have been impossible otherwise.
Without the crucial support of Professor Sir Michael Peckham,
I would never have had the opportunity to develop the training in
forensic psychotherapy under the auspices of the British Postgraduate
Medical Federation at the University of London, which resulted in a
diploma from University College London. Wendy Riley administered
the diploma on behalf of the University of London with tremendous
diligence and collegiality, and Bruce Irvine proved to be a very great
help on the Steering Committee.
I also want to thank the members of the Forensic Women’s group
that met over many years at the Groucho Club. This group of pio-
neering colleagues and students made important contributions to my
own thinking in the forensic field, and I thank them warmly for their
creativity and support. In a wonderful, creative joint effort, the whole
group, under the editorship of Cleo van Velsen and myself, produced
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
together the Practical Guide to Forensic Psychotherapy. Its publication

raised eyebrows among our male colleagues.
I owe thanks to many colleagues overseas whose work has enriched
my thinking greatly, including: Mariam Alizade, Jacqueline Amati-
Mehler, Giovanna Ambrosio, Simona Argentieri, Maria Amon, Luisa
Brunori, Patty Capellino, Chiara Cattelan, Teresa Flores, Maurizio
Freschi, James Gilligan, Julia Lauzon, Moíses Lemlij, Liliana Lorettu,
Amedea Lo Russo, Norberto Marucco, Riccardo Romano, Maria Con-
cetta Scavo, Candida Se Holovko, Athinas Tsoukalis, Amelia Vascon-
cello and Paul Verhaege, as well as the members of the Racker Group
in Venice, namely Hugo Marquez, Marisa Petrilli, and Mauro Rosetti.
I also extend my warmest appreciations to my cherished British col-
leagues, who are too numerous to mention and who, I trust, will for-
give me for not listing each of them personally. I also thank the many
organizations that have invited me to deliver lectures and papers
(which helped to form the basis of the chapters in this book), among
them, the Group Analytic Society of London for inviting me to deliver
the S. H. Foulkes Memorial Lecture, and the Portman Clinic in London
for asking me to deliver the Edward Glover Memorial Lecture. I also
thank Oxford Brookes University for their wisdom when recognizing
the field of forensic psychotherapy in conferring an honorary degree
upon me, and to Bologna University. I have also given key lectures,
which have developed my thinking, at meetings of the Committee
on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalyti-
cal Association, at the Catholic University in Peru, in Buenos Aires,
in Chile, in Sardinia, and in Rome and Venice, among other places. I
also benefited from my teaching on the Diploma Course in Forensic
Psychotherapy at the Portman Clinic, and at the Consiglio Superiore
della Magistratura in Rome.
* * *
I have been most impressed by all my trainees at the Portman Clinic,
and I feel that my work with emotionally damaged mothers has been
especially validated by Carine Minne, who has followed, deepened,
and extended this work in such a difficult setting as Broadmoor Hos-
pital. I am looking forward to her eloquent, sensitive, and insightful
work being published.
I am most grateful to many colleagues for their interest and con-
structive response to my book but am especially grateful to younger
colleagues who not only read parts of the manuscripts at their earlier
stages, but also gave positive criticisms on them, such as Anna Motz
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
and Cleo van Velsen. Alex Goforth has provided much care, patience,
and tenacity in pursuing references, and for being a good listener.
Nigel Warburton has provided me with a link between contemporary
art and the forensic field. Gregorio and Valli Kohon have kindly trans-
lated Horacio Etchegoyen’s foreword from the Spanish into English.
My former student, and now friend and colleague, Brett Kahr, had
first suggested this book to me back in 1994, and he has continued to
encourage me over these last seventeen years. I am very proud to pub-
lish this book in the Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series which
he edits for Karnac Books, and for which I have had the pleasure to
serve as Honorary Consultant since its inception in 2001.
Oliver Rathbone, the Publisher of Karnac Books, kindly offered
me a home for these papers, and I thank him for agreeing to publish
my book. Eric King has proved to be the most patient, detailed, and
helpful of copy-editors, making many extremely constructive contri-
butions to the structure and style of the book.
So many loyal and loving friends have enriched my life and my
work, and I am sure they know who they are. I thank my son Dan,
my daughter-in-law Jo, and my granddaughter Isabella for their love
and care.
E.V.W.
London, February 2011
SERIES FOREWORD
Brett Kahr
Centre for Child Mental Health, London
T
hroughout most of human history, our ancestors have done
rather poorly when dealing with acts of violence. To cite but
one of many shocking examples, let us perhaps recall a case from
1801, of an English boy aged only 13, who was executed by hanging on
the gallows at Tyburn. What was his crime? It seems that he had been
condemned to die for having stolen a spoon (Westwick, 1940).
In most cases, our predecessors have either ignored murderousness
and aggression, as in the case of Graeco–Roman infanticide, which
occurred so regularly in the ancient world that it acquired an almost
normative status (deMause, 1974; Kahr, 1994); or they have punished
murderousness and destruction with retaliatory sadism, a form of uncon-
scious identification with the aggressor. Any history of criminology will
readily reveal the cruel punishments inflicted upon prisoners throughout
the ages, ranging from beatings and stockades, to more severe forms of
torture, culminating in eviscerations, beheadings, or lynchings.
Only during the last one hundred years have we begun to develop
the capacity to respond more intelligently and more humanely to acts
of dangerousness and destruction. Since the advent of psychoanalysis
and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, we now have access to a much
deeper understanding both of the aetiology of aggressive acts and of
their treatment; and nowadays we need no longer ignore criminals or
abuse them—instead, we can provide compassion and containment,
as well as conduct research that can help to prevent future acts of
violence.
xiii
xiv SERIES FOREWORD
The modern discipline of forensic psychotherapy, which can be de-

fined, quite simply, as the use of psychoanalytically orientated “talking
therapy” to treat violent, offender patients, stems directly from the work
of Sigmund Freud. Almost one hundred years ago, at a meeting of the
Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, held on 6 February 1907, Sigmund
Freud anticipated the clarion call of contemporary forensic psycho-
therapists when he bemoaned the often horrible treatment of mentally ill
offenders, in a discussion on the psychology of vagrancy. According to
Otto Rank, Freud’s secretary at the time, the founder of psychoanalysis
expressed his sorrow at the “nonsensical treatment of these people in
prisons” (quoted in Nunberg & Federn, 1962, p. 108).
Many of the early psychoanalysts preoccupied themselves with foren-
sic topics. Hanns Sachs, himself a trained lawyer, and Marie Bonaparte,
the French princess who wrote about the cruelty of war, each spoke
fiercely against capital punishment. Sachs, one of the first members of
Freud’s secret committee, regarded the death penalty for offenders as
an example of group sadism (Moellenhoff, 1966). Bonaparte, who had
studied various murderers throughout her career, had actually lobbied
politicians in America to free the convicted killer Caryl Chessman, dur-
ing his sentence on Death Row at the California State Prison in San
Quentin, albeit unsuccessfully (Bertin, 1982).
Melanie Klein concluded her first book, the landmark text Die Psy-
choanalyse des Kindes [The Psycho-Analysis of Children], with resound-
ing passion about the problem of violence in our culture. Mrs Klein
noted that acts of criminality invariably stem from disturbances in child-
hood, and that if young people could receive access to psychoanalytic
treatment at any early age, then much cruelty could be prevented in
later years. Klein expressed the hope that: “If every child who shows
disturbances that are at all severe were to be analysed in good time,
a great number of these people who later end up in prisons or lunatic
asylums, or who go completely to pieces, would be saved from such a
fate and be able to develop a normal life” (1932, p. 374).
Shortly after the publication of Klein’s transformative book, Atwell
Westwick, a Judge of the Superior Court of Santa Barbara, California,
published a little-known though highly inspiring article, “Criminology
and Psychoanalysis” (1940), in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Westwick
may well be the first judge to commit himself in print to the value of
psychoanalysis in the study of criminality, arguing that punishment of the
forensic patient remains, in fact, a sheer waste of time. With foresight,
Judge Westwick queried, “Can we not, in our well nigh hopeless and
SERIES FOREWORD xv
overwhelming struggle with the problems of delinquency and crime,

profit by medical experience with the problems of health and disease?
Will we not, eventually, terminate the senseless policy of sitting idly by
until misbehavior occurs, often with irreparable damage, then dumping
the delinquent into the juvenile court or reformatory and dumping the
criminal into prison?” (p. 281). Westwick noted that we should, instead,
train judges, probation officers, social workers, as well as teachers and
parents, in the precepts of psychoanalysis, in order to arrive at a more
sensitive, non-punitive understanding of the nature of criminality. He
opined: “When we shall have succeeded in committing society to such a
program, when we see it launched definitely upon the venture, as in time
it surely will be—then shall we have erected an appropriate memorial to
Sigmund Freud” (p. 281).
In more recent years, the field of forensic psychotherapy has become
increasingly well constellated. Building upon the pioneering contribu-
tions of such psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as Edward Glover,
Grace Pailthorpe, Melitta Schmideberg, and more recently Murray Cox,
Mervin Glasser, Ismond Rosen, Estela Welldon, and others too numer-
ous to mention, forensic psychotherapy has now become an increasingly
formalized discipline that can be dated to the inauguration of the Inter-
national Association for Forensic Psychotherapy and to the first annual
conference, held at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in 1991.
The volumes in this series of books will aim to provide both practi-
cal advice and theoretical stimulation for introductory students and for
senior practitioners alike. In the Karnac Books Forensic Psychotherapy
Monograph Series, we will endeavour to produce a regular stream of
high-quality titles, written by leading members of the profession, who
will share their expertise in a concise and practice-orientated fashion.
We trust that such a collection of books will help to consolidate the
knowledge and experience that we have already acquired and will also
provide new directions for the future. In this way, we shall hope to plant
the seeds for a more rigorous, sturdy, and wide-reaching profession of
forensic psychotherapy.
We now have an opportunity for psychotherapeutically orientated
forensic mental health professionals to work in close conjunction with
child psychologists and with infant mental health specialists so that the
problems of violence can be tackled both preventatively and retrospec-
tively. With the growth of the field of forensic psychotherapy, we at last
have reason to be hopeful that serious criminality can be forestalled and
perhaps, one day, even eradicated.
xvi SERIES FOREWORD
References
Bertin, C. (1982). La Dernière Bonaparte. Paris: Librairie Académique
Perrin.
deMause, L. (1974). The evolution of childhood. In: Lloyd deMause (Ed.),
The History of Childhood (pp. 1–73). New York: Psychohistory Press.
Kahr, B. (1994). The historical foundations of ritual abuse: an excavation
of ancient infanticide. In: Valerie Sinason (Ed.), Treating Survivors of
Satanist Abuse (pp. 45–56). London: Routledge.
Klein, M. (1932). The Psycho-Analysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey.
London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis. [First
published as Die Psychoanalyse des Kindes. Vienna: Internationaler Psy-
choanalytischer Verlag.]
Moellenhoff, F. (1966). Hanns Sachs, 1881–1947: the creative unconscious.
In: F. Alexander, S. Eisenstein, & M. Grotjahn (Eds.), Psychoanalytic
Pioneers (pp. 180–199). New York: Basic Books.
Nunberg, H., & Federn, E. (Eds.) (1962). Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalyt-
ic Society. Volume I: 1906–1908, trans. Margarethe Nunberg. New York:
International Universities Press.
Westwick, A. (1940). Criminology and Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 9: 269–282.
FOREWORD
R. Horacio Etchegoyen
I
had the privilege of writing the Foreword for the latest version in
Spanish of Estela Welldon’s Mother, Madonna, Whore, a book that
has travelled the world, gaining a well-deserved eminent place
in psychiatric and psychoanalytic bibliographies. Through the ideas
developed in that book, we now know much more about the complex
relationship between mother and child, and about the deep traces
transmitted from one generation to another. Following this wise, auda-
cious, and enduring book, there is now another—Playing with Dyna-
mite—which extends and deepens the author’s original insights.
This time, the talented author offers us a comprehensive study
of perversions, encompassing the roles of both mother and father,
expanding the understanding of the complex sexual life of human
beings and its vicissitudes.
Chapter 1, on the true nature of perversions, carefully defines their
diagnosis and psychodynamics. It is a wide-ranging, scholarly, and
searching exploration, thoroughly covering other writers’ work on
the subject as well as her own contributions. Welldon never evades
the complexity of the concept of perversion and its ramifications. The
eternal conflict between morality and perversion is studied in depth,
with a scientific approach that goes beyond what social morality and
customs vainly try to circumscribe.
The author describes the diagnostic features of perversion, start-
ing from the phenomenon of dissociation, which she prefers to call
encapsulation. She believes that subjects suffering from perversion do
not ignore the value of their actions, despite maintaining a deception,
xvii
xviii FOREWORD BY R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN
since the right hand does know what the left hand is doing, even
though the subject cannot avoid it. It is a form of exciting imposture,
where the ego and the superego allow themselves to be seduced for a
while by the id, to then restart the whole process again.
A prominent feature of perversions, which Welldon notes with
pristine clarity, is that while male perversions are aimed towards the
outside world, perversions in women are mostly internal, attacking
their own body and what is born from the body—that is, children. In
this way, Welldon redefines female perversion. The dialectic between
idealization and denigration of motherhood, first elaborated in her
previous work, is affirmed and highlights its painful quality. A funda-
mental principle of Welldon’s research is that, underlying all perver-
sions, there is a mortal anxiety that the patient avoids at any price.
Chapter 2 of this valuable book refers to the perversion of trans-
ference. Welldon joins other authors to discuss this concept, not only
in terms of its clinical value but also its therapeutic potential. The
perversion of the transference is, for the author, a malignant bonding,
that goes beyond sadomasochistic relationships, in which narcissism
and aggression lead to the failures or abuses suffered by the perverse
subject at the beginning of his or her life. In this way, perversion links
one generation with both the previous and the next one.
Welldon constantly reminds us that the perverse mother is both
excited and (temporarily) relieved by exerting power over her child
in a diabolical game. In this macabre exchange, the father also partici-
pates with his destructive omnipotence.
Chapter 3 concentrates on the concept of female perversion and
indicates that it is easier to make the diagnosis of fetishism in a man
than it is in a woman, whose fetish is her own child. Taking up Win-
nicott’s concepts of the transitional object and the capacity to be alone,
Welldon points out the importance of remaining attentive to the possi-
bility that a beneficial relation between mother and child can tragically
become a monstrous, addictive link, in which the mother satisfies her
own need to transform her infant into a thing.
The study in chapter 4 of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy leads
Welldon to return to the importance of the body in the tragic cycle of
transgenerational abuse, a topic that she enlarges upon in chapter 5.
Chapter 6 studies the impact on children of witnessing domestic
violence, and chapter 7 is concerned with group psychotherapy in
which abusing patients and victims of abuse take part together, which
allows them to share both pain and insight. It is Welldon’s truly very
original contribution, full of common sense as well as daring.
FOREWORD BY R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN xix
Chapters 8 and 9 examine the relationship of forensic psychother-

apy to society and the courts. The theoretical and practical aspects of
forensic psychotherapy are described in detail and illustrated through
a rich vein of clinical case material.
Chapter 10 looks at the involvement of the Portman Clinic in foren-
sic psychotherapy and the establishment of the International Associa-
tion for Forensic Psychotherapy.
The three interviews interspersed throughout the book present an
account of the author’s trajectory from her native Mendoza, in Argen-
tina, with a fruitful period at the Menninger Clinic, then eventually
to London, where she has had a distinguished career at the Portman
Clinic. Welldon was the force behind the creation of the International
Association for Forensic Psychotherapy, of which she was the founder
and first President and has now been elected Honorary Life Presi-
dent.
A truly admirable book and life.
Buenos Aires, February 2011
FOREWORD
Brett Kahr
F
or the last forty-seven years, Dr Estela Valentina Welldon has
occupied a path-breaking place in the fields of psychotherapy,
psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and mental health. A native of Argen-
tina, she trained as a medical doctor and as a psychiatrist in Mendoza
and at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and then subsequently
in group analytic psychotherapy. Welldon arrived in London in 1964
and began to work with psychiatrically disturbed offender patients
such as murderers, rapists, paedophiles, and others who had commit-
ted grave crimes. Although many of her senior colleagues in the field
recommended simply incarceration and punishment for offenders,
she soon discovered that such patients, known as “forensic patients”,
would respond very successfully to psychological therapy, specifically
psychoanalytically orientated psychotherapy.
After much painstaking work with these often overlooked or
reviled patients, Welldon discovered that many members of the crimi-
nal patient population had suffered from horrific forms of abuse during
childhood. This knowledge has now become widely accepted within
the British mental health community, but during the 1970s and 1980s,
few professionals bothered to study the early childhood histories of
forensic patients with any degree of seriousness, and few dared to
believe in such traumatic realities.
Working at the Portman Clinic in London, a specialist British
NHS institution devoted to the psychoanalytic treatment of offender
patients, Welldon not only undertook important work on the aetiology
of sexual offending and violent offending, but she also pioneered new
xx
FOREWORD BY BRETT KAHR xxi
forms of therapeutic intervention, specifically group psychotherapy

for offender patients, often placing perpetrators and victims together
in the same group. Though shocking at first, Welldon discovered that
only by having criminals and victims confront one another and engage
with one another in this way could the parties begin to mourn the hor-
rors that each had suffered. Once again, this revolutionary approach
to forensic group psychotherapy has now become standard practice in
many mental health care institutions.
Welldon not only worked with patients, but she also distinguished
herself as an educator, creating the world’s first training programme
in forensic psychotherapy at the Portman Clinic, sponsored in col-
laboration with the British Postgraduate Medical Federation and the
Medical School at University College London (UCL). She fought to
gain recognition for this course, which launched in 1990, and which
continued for a short while after her retirement. Welldon personally
trained several generations of excellent mental health professionals
in the forensic field, many of whom have since become world leaders
themselves.
Using her knowledge of groups, and drawing upon her passion
for the forensic mental health field, Welldon also founded a large,
international organization, the International Association for Forensic
Psychotherapy, which now boasts several hundred members world-
wide, and which, in 2011, celebrates its twentieth anniversary as a
scientific organization of excellence. The meetings of the Interna-
tional Association invariably attract the brightest and the most inno-
vative multidisciplinary minds in prison reform, in the prevention
of violence, and in the psychoanalytic assessment and treatment of
dangerousness.
Welldon has written widely, and her landmark books include the
now classic text, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigra-
tion of Motherhood, first published in 1988, as well as a highly readable
book on Sadomasochism (2002). Her books have challenged the myth
that only men commit sexual crimes against children. She broke new
ground by calling our attention to the fact that many women secretly
perpetrate incest and other forms of abuse on the bodies of their
children, as well as upon themselves, and she linked this criminality
and destructiveness to the women’s own deprived and often tortured
backgrounds.
Her new book, Playing with Dynamite: A Personal Approach to the
Psychoanalytic Understanding of Perversions, Violence, and Criminality, is
derived from a generous selection of some of her many literary gems,
xxii FOREWORD BY BRETT KAHR
ranging from her study of the perverse transference, to the role of

babies as transitional objects in perverse motherhood, to the impact
of domestic violence upon children, to the treatment of incest survi-
vors and perpetrators in group psychotherapy, to an analysis of the
professionalization of forensic psychotherapy as a new field of clini-
cal and academic endeavour. Written with characteristic vigour and
verve, and in a style that betokens clear thought, her book constitutes
a veritable education not only in the field of forensic psychoanalysis,
but also in field of traumatology.
But quite apart from Welldon’s professional contributions as an
author and psychotherapist, her personality stands as a model to
young and old colleagues alike. Not content to sit passively on the
sidelines, Welldon has managed to mobilize her considerable charm,
persuasiveness, intelligence, and, above all, passion, to enlist others to
join in the cause. These essays provide a testament to the body of work
that she has spearheaded, and which others have now taken to new
depths and heights, always with her blessing and delight. As Series
Editor of the Karnac Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series, it
gives me much pleasure to welcome this collection.
Estela Welldon has inspired immense love and affection among
her many students and colleagues worldwide. Her contribution to
the mental health field as a clinician, as a researcher, as a writer, and
as a teacher remains unique, and perhaps unparalleled. The forensic
mental health field would be much the poorer without her myriad
contributions. Her legacy will be one that endures for many decades,
if not centuries, to come.
FOREWORD
Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC
I
have known Estela Welldon both socially and professionally for
over thirty years. In many ways our friendship sprang from our
shared interest in the human condition and our fascination with
society’s demands for normalcy, its ability to wrap sexuality in taboo
and secrecy, as well as its desire to punish deviation. That conversation
of our early days has become lifelong, richer and more diverse as time
passes. It has also never been without wit and laughter.
As my law practice in the criminal courts took me into more com-
plex and challenging cases, I drew upon Welldon’s psychiatric exper-
tise to help me unravel the underlying dynamics and pressures acting
upon my clients. Many were women who were defying not just the
legal standards of society but the expectations and beliefs held about
what characterized good womanhood. They were women who stayed
within abusive relationships, women who killed their spouses and
lovers or their children, women who secretly disposed of babies or
sexually abused them, women whose self-loathing made them accept
degradation and humiliation, women who placed their men before the
safety of their offspring, women whose cruelty and depravity shocked
even court-worn barristers like me. Welldon’s groundbreaking work
shed light on all those behaviours in illuminating and sometimes
explosive ways, confronting myths about female sexuality and con-
duct.
Welldon’s book Mother, Madonna, Whore was a seminal work for
professionals working in the fields of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and
psychology, but it also had a powerful effect in the law, explaining
xxiii
xxiv FOREWORD BY BARONESS HELENA KENNEDY, QC
the internal and external factors influencing the behaviour of criminal

women. It explained female dysfunction, perversion, and offending
behaviour to lawyers and judges who were traditionally sceptical
about the contribution the psychological sciences could make to the
criminal justice system. When I look back over the way the law has
changed in the last decades, with a greater acceptance of psychiatric
evidence and a willingness to understand the workings of the human
mind, I think Welldon was undoubtedly one of the experts who helped
create that shift.
The author has many proud achievements. Her expertise in sexual
deviancy and perversion is recognized throughout the world. She is
now an iconic figure in her field. I have also admired how she has
nurtured so many young women in a very male dominated part of her
profession; a whole generation of women forensic psychiatrists and
forensic psychotherapists point to her as their inspiration and mentor.
Many of them are experts who now give evidence in my cases. How-
ever, the cohort of her protégées is by no means confined to women.
Her former students—men and women—all speak to her profound
influence on their practice.
But one of her greatest initiatives has been the establishment of the
International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy, which brings
together specialists from all over the world to share experience and
advance learning. At its annual conference, I too have drawn upon
the wisdom and case studies of practitioners and researchers and
marvelled at the brilliance of its inventor.
This new book draws together many aspects of Estela Welldon’s
life and work. However, in a life so full and multifaceted, no single
volume can do justice to it entirely. What is absolutely clear is that this
is a professional life lived and worked with commitment, insight, and
depths of human compassion that are incomparable. Here is a psychia-
trist who engaged courageously with ideas that discomfited the public
and challenged preconceptions. This is a professional woman who has
always, in her own way, played with dynamite.
INTRODUCTION
James Gilligan
I
can understand the feeling of pleasure and intellectual enlighten-
ment that readers of this book who are already familiar to one
degree or another with Estela Welldon and her clinical, theoretical,
and educational work will experience, because that was my own initial
reaction to this text—and I had already known the author, and worked
with her, since 1993. It is very gratifying to encounter here the further
development of many of her most original and productive insights.
One of these is her groundbreaking theoretical understanding not
just of the psychodynamics of female perversions and violence, but
of the very existence of this category of psychopathology—a form
of destructiveness and self-destructiveness the recognition of which
had been seriously neglected, if not denied, by many psychoanalysts
prior to her opening it up for examination and analysis, the irony of
which is that this is a field one of whose whole raisons d’être is the
overcoming of denial. Freud may have taught us to see how much of
Oedipus there is in all of us, but it took Welldon to show us how much
of Medea there is in the mothers among us—including the Medeas’
own mothers. Apparently it has been easier for those in our profession
to face the castration anxiety that is a universal feature of our own
and our patients’ psyches than to tolerate the even deeper terror of
recognizing that one of our most hallowed and idealized images—
that of motherhood—is so often the locus of the most horrifying
cruelty and sadism towards their own infants and babies and those
of other mothers—a horror that is often avoided by replacing both the
denial and the idealization with an equally unhelpful and distorting
xxv
xxvi INTRODUCTION
denigration of these mothers. It is very appropriate that the book in

which Welldon first formulated her approach to understanding this
still daunting and disturbing problem, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The
Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood, in 1988, was recently singled
out by Pamela Ashurst in the British Medical Journal as a “Medical
Classic” (which it certainly is, and deservedly so).
Another joy of the current book is Welldon’s brilliant description
and analysis of the emerging field of forensic psychotherapy, a field
of which she herself was one of the main creators and developers. It
is true that London’s Portman Clinic, on whose staff she served as a
consultant psychotherapist, had already been founded in a previous
generation by Dr Edward Glover to serve as a base for the provision
of psychoanalytically based therapeutic services to delinquents and
other law breakers. But it was not until Welldon became the founding
director of the first diploma course in this new sub-specialty at the
Portman Clinic in 1990 that this new field actually came of age and
finally had an educational mechanism capable of providing formal on-
going training to each new generation of clinicians. She then followed
that up with her second major contribution to the birth of this new dis-
cipline in the following year when she became the founding president
of the first professional organization devoted to it, the International
Association for Forensic Psychotherapy, which has continued to hold
annual meetings and to serve as a catalyst for the development of post-
graduate training programmes, consultative and therapeutic services
to criminal courts, court clinics, and prison systems, and the writing
and publication of research. Like a number of Welldon’s and my own
colleagues, I was privileged to serve as the president of the Interna-
tional Association for two years, but I am pleased that in recognition
of her central and indispensable role in bringing this new organization
to life, she still serves as its Honorary Life President.
But while I am writing this appreciation of her new book from the
vantage point of one who has known, admired, and learned a great
deal from Welldon over the past eighteen years, the people I really
envy are those who will here be introduced to her personality and her
ideas for the first time. For them, I would like to provide some indica-
tion of why this book, and the remarkable personality and life work of
which it is the most recent product, is truly of historic magnitude and
importance. As Dr Welldon points out in chapter 8, her “Introduction
to Forensic Psychotherapy”, the traditional, indeed age-old, response
to those who commit acts of horrendous cruelty and violence (and
even many of those whose offences against others are much less seri-
INTRODUCTION xxvii
ous) has been to try to protect society and render the criminals harm-
less by punishing them, which currently consists of confining them
in a prison, but otherwise neglecting and ignoring them. This is the
approach that was championed by Prime Minister John Major when
he said that what society needs is a little more condemning and a little
less understanding.
But there are several reasons why that approach is a counter-
productive, self-defeating, and self-deluding waste of time and money,
which neither protects society nor renders the criminals harmless and
which may in fact do more to stimulate crime and violence than to
prevent them. First of all, that approach makes it impossible for us to
learn anything of value as to why they committed their destructive
acts—which the offenders themselves do not know, to begin with,
and which we and they can only learn by engaging in serious, intense,
and prolonged dialogue with them. And until we can learn what
motivated their destructive behaviour, we have no way of knowing
how we can prevent such behaviour in the future—by them and by
other potential criminals who have not yet offended.
We know that, for several reasons, imprisonment is not an effec-
tive means of preventing violence and protecting society. First, there
are simply too many criminals committing too many crimes, and we
cannot lock them all up and keep them there for a lifetime or we
would have to build hundreds of new prisons and subject hundreds of
thousands more people to that form of social death. In addition to the
fact that that would turn any nation into a police state, it would also
bankrupt the government (even the most stripped-down prisons that
do nothing but warehouse their inmates are horrendously expensive).
And letting prisoners out after having offered them no opportunity
to become able to understand why they have ruined their own lives
as well as those of others merely results in what we see happening
already: frustratingly high recidivism rates, with all too many dis-
charged prisoners committing new crimes and returning to prison
for new sentences. This is hardly surprising, given that prisons have
always been known as “schools for crime” , which they demonstrably
are—indeed, graduate schools.
The only feasible alternative to this manifestly failed approach to
the age-old goal of crime prevention is the new field of forensic psy-
chotherapy. That does not, of course, mean that we should not restrain
people who are currently violent from harming others (or themselves),
if necessary by depriving them of their liberty for as long as they
continue to show a predisposition to behave in that way. Given the
xxviii INTRODUCTION
limitations of our current knowledge as to how to prevent violence,

that is a tragic choice that we must sometimes make, though always
temporarily. But there is a huge difference between restraint and pun-
ishment (by which I mean the gratuitous and avoidable infliction of
pain above and beyond whatever suffering is unavoidably caused by
the loss of freedom).
But there are three points that can be made about that. First, it
makes all the difference in the world what we do with violent offend-
ers once we have locked them up. If we follow the traditional practice,
we would either neglect them or abuse them (or both). And that is a
recipe for the degree of recidivism and future violence from which
we already suffer. Which is why it is so important to take advantage
of having a (literally) captive audience and make a meaningful pro-
gramme of forensic psychotherapy available to those whom we have
isolated from the community, so that when they return to the commu-
nity (as they all should, sooner or later) they will not reoffend.
Second, it is time that we recognized that the modern prison sys-
tem is an initially well-meaning social experiment (it was, after all,
founded by Quakers like John Howard and Enlightenment reformers
like Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham as a replacement for even
more barbaric punishments, such as torture, mutilation, and execu-
tion) that has failed. Far from achieving the original goals of protect-
ing the public and reforming the criminals, it has had the opposite
effect. The only rational thing to do now would be to replace prisons
with a whole new type of institution that would have two main func-
tions: as a safe, secure therapeutic community, in which whoever was
too violent to remain in the community would participate in forensic
psychotherapy and whatever other types of therapy they needed (for
substance abuse, medical conditions, etc.); and as a residential college
or university in which the residents would be able to get as much
education as they had the ability to acquire.
Third, it is important to recognize, as Welldon explains in this book
and as I have witnessed repeatedly, that far from finding the depriva-
tion of liberty to be a source of suffering, many of the most violent
men and women experience it as a relief. In my own experience, what
the most violent people I have seen feared most was their own loss of
control, and they experienced an externally imposed set of controls
as a source of safety and an escape from chaos—for themselves and
everyone else. And once they have available the tools they need in
order to remake themselves, such as psychotherapy and education,
they welcome it. One of the San Francisco jail inmates with whom I
INTRODUCTION xxix
worked said, “I should be in here for four years, not just four months,
because I’m trying to change the habits of a lifetime.”
As my colleagues and I demonstrated in the jails of San Francisco,
it is possible, if you try hard enough, with an intensive multidimen-
sional treatment programme lasting no more than four months, to
reduce violent recidivism by 83 per cent, compared with an untreated
control group of otherwise identical violent criminals. And as expen-
sive as this program was, it actually saved the tax-payers $4 for every
$1 spent on it, since the reduced re-incarceration rate saved far more
money than the therapy cost (in addition to the fact that the public’s
safety was increased far more by this programme than by the tradi-
tional approach, and the fact that men who would otherwise spend
most of their lives in prisons and jails had learned how to live success-
fully and non-violently in the community).
Now, one might think that with the success of this pilot demonstra-
tion of what you can accomplish with a serious programme of forensic
psychotherapy—which was so unprecedented that it won a major
national award (including a $100,000 prize) from a foundation admin-
istered by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and as I
said actually saved the taxpayers a substantial amount of money—any
rational city or state or nation would be rushing to find out how to rep-
licate it. Think again. The political unpopularity, at least in the United
States, of doing anything constructive for and with men (and women)
who have been identified as “criminals” is so great that in response to
right-wing protests against “coddling” violent criminals, funding for
the San Francisco programme has been cut (you might say that, like
any good bank-robber, the politicians took the $100,000 prize money
and ran), and other US cities interested in it were unable to allocate
the funds needed to serve as the initial down-payment with which to
replicate it in their jails and prisons, so that major requests to replicate
our approach have come only from prison systems in other countries
around the world (from New Zealand and Singapore to Poland).
What are the implications of this for the future of forensic psycho-
therapy? First, we need to recognize, as Welldon does in this book,
that the public’s attitude (and that of many of the politicians) can be,
and sometimes is, just as irrational, self-defeating, and violence-pro-
voking as that of the criminals they would rather punish than cure,
and on whom they would rather waste money than save it. Certainly
educating the public and the politicians about this sounds like a good
idea; but perhaps we need to go beyond education (which assumes
rationality) and think about how to adapt the principles of forensic
xxx INTRODUCTION
psychotherapy (which assumes a mixture of rationality and irration-

ality) so that we could make it available and acceptable to the public
and the politicians as well as to the criminals. (Welldon’s predecessor
in this field, the eminent psychoanalyst Edward Glover, wanted to
bring psychoanalysis to the politicians. I would have to say that that
still sounds like a good idea.)
Second, we need to recognize, as Welldon also does in this book,
that the major innovation in forensic psychotherapy’s approach to
human violence, irrationality, and destructiveness is that it provides a
method, one that has never existed until now, for advancing “beyond
morality”, so to speak, and replacing the quest for attaining “justice”
by means of punishment (even when that approach is demonstrably
self-defeating) with the medical attitude that we do not play God and
presume to have either the knowledge or the right to decide who is
evil and who is good, or who deserves punishment and who does not.
Instead, like any clinician, we do not morally condemn our patients
for being sick, we just try to diagnose their illness, treat it, and, to the
degree possible, prevent it from recurring in them or occurring in
others.
In other words, morality is not the solution, morality is the
problem. If the public and the politicians would rather punish violent
behaviour than cure those who are engaging in it, even though that
only stimulates more violence, endangers them further, and puts them
to even greater expense, one reason for their choice (or, at least, one
means by which they rationalize it) is because they think in moral
terms rather than in pragmatic, scientific, medical terms.
One problem with passing moral value judgments on those who
are violent rather than attempting to learn how to understand them is
that judging them morally does not help us in the least to learn what
is causing them to become violent and what we can do to decrease the
likelihood that they or others will behave in that way in the future.
Another respect in which those popular public and political attitudes
are similar to those of the very criminals against which they are direct-
ed is that criminals commit their crimes for exactly the same (moral)
reasons that lead the public and the politicians to want to punish the
criminals—namely, in order to attain justice. What we call crime is sim-
ply the form in which those we call criminal offenders are attempting
to punish those by whom they feel offended (even if they sometimes
direct that punishment onto scapegoats, if the original offenders are
not as available or as vulnerable as those on whom they choose to take
revenge for whatever offences they have suffered in the past).
INTRODUCTION xxxi
In other words, just as we forensic psychotherapists need to over-

come our own tendency to regress to moralizing attitudes in our
response to the violent people with whom we work, so a central
component of our therapeutic intervention is to help them to outgrow
their own moralistic attitudes, which have provided them with the
motivation and the rationale for committing their acts of violence. If
only we could do the same with those members of the public and those
politicians (and fortunately this does not include all members of either
group) who would rather punish the criminals than treat them! But
that will be a task for those who will replace old-timers like Welldon
and me. That is why I am so glad that this book is coming out now, as
I think that the depth of wisdom and experience contained in it cannot
fail to be of help to those in the younger generation who will carry on
the same quest for creating a more humane society that has animated
Welldon’s life and work.
An interview with Estela V. Welldon,
July 1996
B
RETT KAHR: Estela, it’s a very great pleasure to interview you, and I
thought it would be useful if we could begin with how you came to
the field of forensic psychotherapy, and really how you sculpted this
field and made it your own. It would be very interesting for readers if we
could ask you some questions about the influences in terms of your own per-
sonal life and in terms of the teachers you had—because I know you worked
with some rather distinguished teachers in the psychiatric and psychoana-
lytic worlds—to see how you came to be the forensic psychotherapist you
are today. So let’s start at the beginning: you were born in Argentina . . .
ESTELA V. WELLDON: I really don’t want to believe that I’m the creator
of forensic psychotherapy, or the person who has sculpted it either. I
believe that the influence of my teachers has been essential to the inter-
est or even passion that in a process of identification I’ve developed in
this field, and in the way that I’ve contributed to the training of young
people, people who are enormously courageous and extremely skilled
in their own fields and who are then able to develop and to gain an
awareness of unconscious mechanisms that had been unavailable to
them before. . . . You asked me about Argentina, and I’m already talk-
ing about the present. It’s difficult at times to fill in the gaps because
it’s not only a long life, but also a rich life, so I have to talk about the
essential stages of my own training.
Firstly, I qualified as a teacher of children with Down’s syndrome,
and then as I was working with them I realized that I could do far more
by becoming a doctor and psychiatrist, so in a way I went into medi-
cine in order to become a psychiatrist. I had to endure all this medicine
1
2 PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE
to become a psychiatrist. I must add that I could only do my medical

studies because at that time not only all universities in Argentina were
free, but also a new medical school had been founded four years before
in my own hometown. It was a pilot project with only 60 students a
year, as compared to 2,000 in Buenos Aires, the capital. We had very
stringent and rigorous selection exams. I’ve always felt a great debt of
gratitude to my university since I’ve given so little or nothing in return
for all that I received. The economic situation at home, with my par-
ents struggling to realize their own ideals, was quite precarious. They
were certainly unable to afford university fees, and I was blissfully
unaware of what I took for granted. Indeed, I felt very fortunate to sell
encyclopaedias from door to door, compared to many other students,
such as the butcher’s son, who had to work a night shift to provide
for his parents before he could attend the daily university duties. I
had assumed that university was free for everybody everywhere in
the world!
Q: Were your parents doctors?
A: Oh no, they were children of very poor European immigrants, the
first generation born in Argentina. From early childhood my father
had to fend for himself, and he developed an enormous passion for
the written word. His dream was to publish books, and his hero
was Gutenberg. Through his sheer determination and tenacity he was
eventually able to have his own printing shop and later a publishing
house where he was the main craftsman. He was not good at manag-
ing finances, and it was my mother’s main task to provide him with
an area of complete containment and security where she was in charge
of all practical matters.
Q: What was psychiatry like in Argentina in the late 1950s? Was it analytic
at all?
A: There were many psychoanalysts, perhaps the largest number of
psychoanalysts working in any country, but all of them were in Buenos
Aires. Mendoza, my own town, is a mountain city located in the foot-
hills of the Andes. Of course, with my one-track interest in becoming
a psychiatrist I was pretty soon involved in psychological matters. In
the Department of Psychological Medicine, third-year students tried
to get a teacher with more psychoanalytic input. We were very lucky
to get Dr Etchegoyen, who later became President of the International
Psychoanalytical Association. Interestingly enough, I think I was the
first analysand in Mendoza. Dr Etchegoyen arrived and became the pro-
fessor, the dean, of a very active, interested group of people, as well as
the psychoanalyst of most of us. So many boundaries had to be kept.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ESTELA V. WELLDON, JULY 1996 3
These boundaries were very firm and sometimes ridiculous, but very
necessary. For example, my private sessions with him were at 6.40
a.m., and he was very much of the old school, shaking hands at the
beginning and at the end of each interview. But then at 8 o’clock I had
to be at work, and if I was two or three minutes late he would be very
angry with me, saying that as a student of his I had to be on time.
Q: So you had your analytic session with Horacio Etchegoyen and then
went straight to being his student?
A: Not just his student, but also his student assistant. In Argentina at
that time, each university department had a paid job for one student,
and many students used to apply for that one post. It was a formal
procedure in which the application included both the CV and a viva
with a patient. The job was for one year only, so new applicants would
come forward every year. I got it for four consecutive years. So Profes-
sor Etchegoyen was also my employer, my boss.
Q: And you published your first paper with him as well?
A: That’s right. We published it in Chile in 1959. In fact, before I got
into analysis with him I went to see his former analyst in Buenos Aires,
Heinrich Racker, who was meant to become my training analyst later.
I talked to him about the difficulties of starting an analysis with the
only psychoanalyst in my hometown, who was also my mentor and
my boss. He said, “Do it, because it will be all about transference and
countertransference.” And I had to do it. Unfortunately, after finishing
medical school and just as I was supposed to start my training analysis
with Dr Racker, he died of cancer. That kind of situation has happened
again and again in my life.
When I left Argentina, the Mendoza Psychoanalytic Society hadn’t
yet been recognized as a training institute, but now it has, and when I
arrived at the Menninger School of Psychiatry, it was obvious that the
training I had received in Mendoza was at an advanced level.
Q: Before you go on to Topeka, let me just ask about the clinical experiences
you had in Mendoza. What kind of patients were referred to the Department
and what range of experience did you have with patients?
A: People who go into medicine all over the world are very sceptical
and cynical about unconscious matters. But we were extremely lucky
to have a patient whom we could immediately recognize as suffer-
ing from a very serious post-traumatic stress disorder. The patient
was a 30-year-old woman who talked like a 3-year-old girl. With that
patient, Professor Etchegoyen did hypno-analysis, with all the medi-
cal students around watching, and brought her back to different ages.
Eventually he brought her back to the exact time when she had been
sexually abused, and it became extremely clear when she began talk-
ing like a child of that age. The medical students could no longer bear a
wall of resistance and deny the unconscious processes. It was extraor-
dinary. Another clinical case that fostered analytic thinking and its
application occurred in the teaching hospital. A 13-year-old anorexic
girl, who had gone unsuccessfully through all the departments, was
on the verge of dying because of her refusal to eat. She was in intensive
care and was likely to die within the next two or three days. As a last
resort, they decided to send her to us, the Department of Psychiatry,
where I began to treat her with analytic psychotherapy. Eventually the
treatment was very successful and the girl recovered.
Q: Can we return to the first case you mentioned, about the woman who
had been sexually abused? So much of your recent work has focused on
women as perpetrators of abuse, at a time, even now in the 1990s, when
most people don’t believe it. What was it like to you in the late 1950s to hear
about a case of sexual abuse? Was it published in the newspapers, or did this
come as a shock when it emerged in the hypno-analysis?
A: It was an extraordinary case that was used very positively for the
understanding of unconscious processes. Was I shocked? No, because
we’d already learnt most of the theoretical concepts with Professor
Etchegoyen. But we were also aware that, as a professor, he had to
compromise.
Q: It’s very unusual, because most English psychiatrists who trained in that
same period claim not to have had an awareness of sex-abuse matters.
A: I know.
Q: I wonder whether Etchegoyen had a more enlightened department?
A: I think it was due exclusively because he was an extremely coura-
geous man who was very inspiring to us all. He was essential in my
life not only as an analyst, but as a kind of inspiring force. And he
made it clear that he had many expectations for my future as a profes-
sional.
Q: So you graduated in psychiatry in Mendoza and then you took up a
resident post at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas. How on earth did you get
from Mendoza to Kansas?
A: Again, this had very much to do with Professor Etchegoyen. I was
supposed to come back to our own department after my overseas
training. And my applications to different schools of psychiatry in the
United States were made with his encouragement. They were sent at
the beginning of 1962 for the following year, since I qualified in Sep-
tember 1962, but to our enormous surprise the Menninger accepted me
for the same year. Our department was going through a difficult time,
as other departments were envious of the prosperity and reputation

Professor Etchegoyen had brought the department. I had to leave just
when this situation emerged.
Eventually, I decided not to return to Argentina, not to return to
Mendoza.
Q: So Professor Etchegoyen recommended that you go to the Menninger
Clinic. Had you ever heard of the Menninger Clinic? It was very well known
in the United States, but was it known in Argentina?
A: Not only did I know of the Menninger Clinic, but we also knew
of Maxwell Jones and the Henderson Hospital. Such was the range of
Professor Etchegoyen’s knowledge. He wanted to know everything
about everything.
Q: So you were prepared to take on the principles of community psychiatry,
social psychiatry, groups, and so forth?
A: Exactly.
Q: What a fabulous training you had! So you got to the Menninger Clinic in
1962, and, of course, at that time it was still being run by Dr Karl Menninger
himself. Is it true that all his students called him Dr Karl?
A: Yes, we did all call him Dr Karl.
Q: What was he like as a man?
A: Extremely affable and compassionate. Every Saturday morning
he had what he called a colloquium that we were all “coerced” into
attending. Not only was there a lot about crime and punishment to
keep me interested, but also there were delicious doughnuts and cof-
fee. He didn’t allow anybody to smoke, but he wasn’t against the pipe,
so I began to smoke a pipe, just to be a bit controversial, as usual.
Q: So there you are at the Menninger. Dr Karl had already written many
books on crime and punishment, which was his great area of interest. Was
that one of the pieces of writing that stimulated you into thinking about
forensic matters?
A: Yes. In fact, in Argentina I’d already begun working in borstals.
But what I most remember of my first weeks in the United States is the
great cultural shock to arrive there. It was really terrible . . . terrible.
The social situation in America was absolutely appalling. And the fact that
I was a young professional woman on my own astounded them. I was
regularly asked, what, have you never ever been married? For me it
was a matter of great pride, but for them it was a sign of inadequate
behaviour. I was met with suspicion, and I felt not only misunderstood
but offended by this sort of confrontation, which betrayed their culture
of bias and prejudices. A similar situation arose when they learnt that
I wasn’t a member of a particular church and I had received by mail

an invitation to join a group of people who did not have any church
affiliation.
When I arrived, I was delighted to be assigned to a wonderful
ward, in a very nice building with air conditioning. All the staff except
for the matron were black. I’d never encountered black people in my
life before, and I just wanted to make it work. I always want to make
it work. But I had a number of very disturbing experiences. One day,
I told them I’d take them all for lunch at a local Mexican restaurant.
They looked puzzled and I wasn’t sure exactly why. I took them to
the restaurant, and as soon as we arrived the Mexican guy said to me,
“You’re welcome to come here, but not the rest of your party”.
Q: Oh, my God!
A: I hadn’t expected this. I confronted the staff and asked them why
on earth they hadn’t told me before so we didn’t have to go through
this humiliation? They replied, “Well, you’re the doctor so you’re the
one who determines things.” I had such power that they wouldn’t
even dare to say anything.
Q: They must have hoped that as the doctor you would have been able to
magically get them in.
A: No, I don’t think so. In their minds they couldn’t go against me.
Later, we began to have meetings in my house, because, as black peo-
ple, they couldn’t invite me into their own meeting places. I used to
have a one-room flat in a rather derelict area, and so, following the tra-
dition, every Wednesday night I had a meeting in my flat for my staff.
I cooked food for them and we discussed clinical matters about our
patients and had theoretical seminars. One day, my landlord, who’d
been very impressed and proud to have someone from the Menninger
living in one of his little flats, came to me and said, “Dr D’Accurzio,
please, I don’t want to upset you, but we have to do something about
your parties.” I said, “What parties? I don’t have any parties. I have
working parties and we don’t make any noise. Have the neighbours
complained?” He said, “Look, please, I’d like you to stay in the apart-
ment, but tell your staff to come through the back door”. So I told him
to keep the flat in his back passage. You see what I mean. That was
injustice, social injustice, which has always been the main preoccupa-
tion in my life—much more than, say, crime and punishment, since
social injustice is at the root of most violent and deviant behaviour.
Q: It seems to me that there is an organic link between what happened to
your black staff then and what happens to your forensic patients now, how
the marginalized get further punished and further humiliated.
A: That’s right. The other shocking situation was that, while in

my hometown then we were 50% women and 50% men in medical
school, there were just a handful of women at the Menninger out of
70 people. This also was a source of problems. My lack of English
produced another interesting situation because, as a single woman
living on my own, I would devote all my time to my patients. I vis-
ited them on weekends and asked them to write about their lives—
which was a good way for me to learn English. Some people only
wrote one page, some wrote forever, which was quite an education
about their mental state. I then checked my own English by asking
them questions. But suddenly I was reprimanded because my col-
leagues complained that I was working too hard and their patients
were complaining that they didn’t have such a “good” doctor. I got
into trouble again.
Q: You were too interested in your patients?
A: Well, I was also trying to learn English, mind you! Then there was
the first American patient I ever had—a black woman from Alabama—
I couldn’t understand a word she said. I thought I had better take the
next flight back to Argentina, but when I asked the rest of the staff,
nobody had understood a word either, so I was greatly relieved.
Q: I want to ask about the kinds of patients you saw at the Menninger,
because Menninger’s was known as a very fancy private clinic where all
the Hollywood movie stars would go for their breakdowns. But I gather you
didn’t work with movie stars?
A: I didn’t work with movie stars. I worked with extremely disturbed
patients. For example, we had a woman from a small island in the
China Sea who appeared in all the newspapers in the Midwest. This
one picture showed an enormous fridge, with an open door, full of
food, and the caption said, “Woman kills her three children because
of lack of food.”
Q: A perfect Welldon case.
A: The fact is, while we waited for this woman to arrive in the ward,
we worried that the other patients would be very aggressive towards
her because she’d killed her children. But when the woman arrived she
wasn’t talking at all, wasn’t communicating with anybody, and was in
a completely psychotic state. All the patients were extremely nice to
her, offering her cups of tea, showing the most amazing compassion,
which came as a complete surprise to the staff.
The system at the Menninger was very strong in trying to work
out symbols in a concrete way. For example, instead of giving electric
shocks to our women with melancholia, they were made to clean the
dirtiest areas. These were very wealthy elderly ladies who were made
to clean dirty toilets or to sand down layers of paint. It was very dif-
ficult to get the nurses to make them do this, because nurses usually
like to be nice to their patients, whereas they had to be absolutely
awful to these patients, shouting at them. The patients had actually
internalized an enormous amount of anger against themselves and
their self-esteem was very low, so there were constant attacks on
themselves—and that, in a nutshell, is melancholia. In this way, their
outside world represented what the internal world was like, and when
they could eventually say to the nurse in charge of their treatment,
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself!” everybody congratulated them
because it was a great achievement.
Q: And was it a helpful treatment?
A: In the case of the young woman, she was thought to be emotionally
regressing and unable to remember any English—it was the 1960s and
the institutions had lots of money, so immediately a psychologist who
could speak her own dialect was hired. It took him a long time to com-
municate with her. She had a very complicated history: the Americans
had occupied her island and allegedly it was the only area left where
families welcomed the birth of girls, because they were used as pros-
titutes by the age of 13 or 14. When this girl was born she was greeted
with joy because she’d be able to help keep the family. However, when
she began to talk about her early life to the psychologist, she indicated
that from the age of 12 or 13 she was not behaving according to what
was expected of her: she didn’t want to go into prostitution. Then she
came to know this black American soldier, but of course she knew
nothing about colour differences. She married him believing she’d
made the best life for herself. Then he was sent back to America, tak-
ing her with him, and as soon as they arrived a sense of despair came
over her; she was isolated and ostracized because she was married to
a black man.
Q: So already in the early 1960s we have a case of female infanticide, of a
mother using her children as part-objects, and this is in many ways a harbin-
ger of all your later writings on female perversion and female violence. Did
this case at the time stand out in your mind as a one-off, or had you already
begun to develop the idea that there is this potential for violence and perver-
sion in every woman in relation to her children?
A: Well, I think that this was an extreme case. This woman had a
psychotic breakdown, and perhaps it had begun from very early on.
Violence is difficult to determine; it was violence against herself, and
the violence in this particular woman was in killing her children—it
wasn’t about taking her revenge on her husband, even though he was
responsible for her miserable situation in the States, which he was
completely unaware of. But you can see how the children represented
the parts of herself that were going to suffer in the future, and she
wanted to eliminate this future suffering.
Q: But what is extraordinary is that nobody could see the metaphor and the
symbolism of the woman saying she had no food, and in fact the newspapers
had to take it in a very concrete way, and say—look at this fridge, she’s got
lots of food.
A: That’s the way tabloids sell their papers, by being “concrete” and
forgetting—actually not wanting to know—symbolism and symbolic
implications, since this would make things far more complex.
Q: So this was very much the golden age of the Menninger Clinic, when lots
of people were coming from all over the world to train. Who else did you
meet and work with, apart from Dr Karl?
A: Indeed, I was very fortunate to have access to many important
and inspiring people in the field, such as Margaret Mead, who used
to do seminars there. We would have drinks in our homes, as poor
as they might be, and she would be happy to come and enjoy the
evening, and we learned an enormous amount from her teachings. It
was also the time of Robert Wallerstein, Ralph Slovenko, and Joseph
Sutton. I remember a three-day meeting on violence and criminol-
ogy in which many experts—criminologists, anthropologists, lawyers,
judges—were present. There were about fourteen of us, and some of us
were lucky enough to be able to sit behind their chairs and just listen.
The whole of the first day was spent discussing how the language from
different fields could become one, and the impossibility of this task
was so painfully evident: the legal, judicial, psychiatric, psychological
languages were so different that seemingly they could never merge
with one another.
It was also the time of Otto Kernberg, who was there with his wife
Pauline, a child psychiatrist-psychoanalyst. I have a funny anecdote
about how he was a surprisingly practical man for such a great theore-
tician. When I thinking of leaving the United States to go to England, I
asked for his opinion and he said, “Estela, it is very simple. Just make
two lists: the reasons why you should go and the reasons why you
should stay. Then just look at both lists and see which one is longer!”
Not much psychoanalytic subtlety about that, but lots of practical
wisdom!
I also met Maxwell Jones, who came to give a series of lectures
there, as well as different professors from Europe.
My English began to develop in funny ways, as you can see, but

the idea was that I was the most sophisticated person when it came to
psychological, unconscious situations. It created an enormous amount
of rivalry, which in a way was quite good, but my lack of versatility in
English was a handicap that people could use against me.
Q: So you were at Menninger’s in 1963 when JFK was shot—what kind of
ripple did that cause in the Clinic?
A: That again was another cultural shock for me. It was a very strange
experience, one that I will never forget. It was a Friday. The residents,
or Senior Registrars, had a very spacious room in which we could have
our lunch together. You brought your own little bit of food and you
each ate out of your own little packet. So we were all eating our own
pre-packed lunches when this secretary from reception came running
in, extremely upset, saying that President Kennedy had been shot.
Some of us—I particularly remember a Cuban colleague—were very
upset, but others were quite pleased. There was a man from South
Carolina who said that it was about time it happened. I know that
people want to believe that everyone’s response was one of shock and
bereavement, but that was not so.
Actually arriving in Topeka had been another cultural shock for
me. It was a very small town, much smaller than Mendoza, and it
didn’t even have the wonderful views of mountains on the horizon.
There was no cinema, no concerts, and no theatre. It was also a “dry”
state, so you couldn’t have a drink in any public place. Every two
weeks the Menninger would put on a film, and I remember very
well that that Friday it was A Taste of Honey and we’d all been look-
ing forward to seeing it. In my own country, a film or any other sort
of entertainment would immediately be stopped as a sign of respect.
When I talked to some of my colleagues about trying to stop this
film, they just laughed at me. So with two or three others we went
to the place where the film would be shown and told the technicians
to stop it because we had been told to stop the whole thing. In fact
we had not been told, and we were behaving in a rather delinquent
way. The technicians didn’t seem to be surprised, but the ones who
were surprised were my colleagues who arrived soon afterwards.
Strangely enough, or perhaps aptly enough, the following morning
in the colloquium, Dr Karl congratulated all of us for such a wise
decision—because we’d shown an enormous degree of respect at
President Kennedy’s death. Of course he never learned the whole
story. So some of us felt rather smug about it, and perhaps we had a
few extra doughnuts that morning . . .
Q: How long did you stay there altogether? Was it three years?
A: No, two years.
Q: Coming from a small town to an even smaller town must have been very
stifling in many ways; you must have had ideas of roaming to somewhere
more exotic, more culturally stimulating, which would give you more oppor-
tunities to try out your new ideas. How did London first present itself as a
possibility?
A: I was very tempted to come to London not only because of the psy-
choanalytic school but also because of the writings of Bion on group
processes at the Tavistock Clinic. I very much wanted to leave Topeka,
as the way of life there didn’t suit me, but I was anxious not to upset
Dr Karl because I was very fond of him and he had quite a soft spot
for me. I told him that I would go to the Tavistock Clinic for one year
only, to study group dynamics, and would then come back to the Men-
ninger. He was somewhat disappointed, but immediately, in his very
generous way, he offered to introduce me to Anna Freud. He wrote a
letter to her to the effect that I was this young woman full of zeal and
enthusiasm and all that. It was a very nice letter, and also very curi-
ous, because at the end he talked about coming to London and riding
horses together with Anna Freud. I was quite perplexed, given their
ages. But I never used that letter.
Q: Why not?
A: Because I was always very influenced by Kleinian ideas and I didn’t
feel I was doing the right thing by approaching Anna Freud. Also, I
felt very strongly about making it on my own. But Professor Norval
Morrison from the Criminology Institute in Chicago, who had also
given me several letters which I never used, also wrote to the intended
recipients of these letters, who then approached me. That was how I
got to know Hugh Klare, who was then Chair of the Howard League,
and it was he and Robert Andry who encouraged me to apply to the
Henderson Hospital.
Q: Did you not go to the Tavistock after all?
A: I went to the Tavistock and I saw Martha Harris and Bob Gosling.
The Tavistock was then in Beaumont Street, and Martha and Bob
were extremely helpful to me. But suddenly I had another shock. In
America, having a job as a psychiatrist was enough to pay for my own
training and my everyday living. But when I came to England, with
only $50, it wasn’t the same at all. From America I’d booked a room in
a B&B in Gower Street, thinking I’d find a job immediately. Jobs were
offered to me, but I didn’t want them, because they were not within the
psychodynamic field or with forensic patients. Another shock was that

psychiatry in the UK was strongly divided—between psychiatry per
se, meaning biological treatment, and psychoanalysis, almost exclu-
sively dealt with privately, except for the Tavistock Clinic. Both ide-
ologies were segregated into two different worlds, one represented by
the Maudsley and the other by the Tavistock. It became very difficult
after that first week, when I was thrown out of the B&B. Fortunately,
Hugh Klare got in touch with me and directed me to the Henderson
Hospital, where I applied for a position as a Registrar.
Q: Tell me about the Henderson Hospital. It was already a well-known insti-
tution for therapeutic communities and community psychiatry.
A: For me it was extraordinary because I’d already known about the
teachings of Maxwell Jones in Argentina and had then met him in the
States. But then he’d moved to Dingleton in Scotland.
A very curious thing happened with Maxwell Jones. He and Morris Car-
stairs, who was then Professor of Psychiatry at the Department of Psy-
chiatry in Edinburgh, used to come to London and to spend some time
together. At that time I had a one-room flat near Regent’s Park. With
the Carstairs we were like an extended family, and this was still the
case even after his death. Morris sometimes used to stay in my place,
though I’d never had Maxwell there. At that point I got a letter from
Max asking if he could to come to stay one Friday night to talk about
the therapeutic community. He slept in my bed, and I slept in a small
bed, dreading that he’d wake up very early in the morning, as I knew
he was an insomniac. Anyway, at 4 or 4.30 in the morning it was very
dark and I heard noises and saw somebody. I thought, “Oh goodness
me, this man has now woken up and would like to have a cup of tea.”
So I said, “Max”, but—surprise surprise—the voice saying “Estela”
didn’t come from the chair, it came from the other bed! Somebody
else was sitting in the chair. I always had the windows open, and it
was a semi-basement. As soon as I’d said “Max” and Max replied, the
person rushed off through the windows, leaving all the rugs behind.
The amazing thing was that when I said I wanted to call the police,
Max said, “Are you mad? Can you imagine what the journalists will
do about this one, with us as experts in deviant behaviour becoming
naïve victims! We’ll appear in the tabloids on Sunday and everyone
will assume that there’s something going on between us, so we’ll just
keep this completely between ourselves!”
Q: What did you do after that? It must have been very frightening.
A: Well, I decided that it was very important not to leave the place, so
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Jerry Todd and the Talking
Frog
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.
Title: Jerry Todd and the Talking Frog
Author: Leo Edwards
Illustrator: Bert Salg
Release date: March 5, 2022 [eBook #67564]

Most recently updated: April 5, 2022
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Grosset & Dunlap
Credits: Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

https://www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The Internet
Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JERRY TODD AND THE
TALKING FROG ***
[Contents]
[Contents]
[Contents]
JERRY TODD
AND THE
TALKING FROG
[Contents]
Jerry Todd and the Talking Frog. Frontispiece—(Page 12)
MR. RICKS ABSENT-MINDEDLY POURED THE SYRUP DOWN
THE BACK OF HIS NECK AND SCRATCHED HIS PANCAKE!
[Contents]
JERRY TODD
AND THE
TALKING FROG
BY
LEO EDWARDS
Author of
THE JERRY TODD BOOKS, ETC.

GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS : : NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
[Contents]
Copyright, 1925, by
The Methodist Book Concern,
Cincinnati, Ohio
Copyright, 1925, by
GROSSET & DUNLAP [v]
[Contents]
JERRY TODD SAYS:
When I started writing this book, I thought of calling it: JERRY TODD AND THE
PUZZLE ROOM MYSTERY. But Scoop told me that wasn’t the proper title. “There
is more in the book about the talking frog than there is about the puzzle room,”
he pointed out. “So why don’t you call it JERRY TODD AND THE TALKING
FROG?”
So it was our leader, you see, who gave this book its title.
Like my other books, this is a fun-mystery-adventure story. The “fun” part is

where we peddle the spy’s beauty soap. Bubbles of Beauty, let me tell you, was
very wonderful soap! At first we couldn’t believe that it would do all of the
amazing things that Mr. Posselwait claimed for it. But that is where we got a
surprise!
There is a ghost in this story. B-r-r-r-r! At midnight it comes to the old haunted
house, walking on the porches. Creepy, I’ll tell the world. We kept the doors
locked. For we were all alone in the brick house, Scoop and I and Peg and our
[vi]new chum, Tom Ricks. It was to help our new chum that we braved the perils
of the haunted house. You see, a puzzle maker had met with a strange death in
the brick house, and that is what made it haunted.
“Ten and ten.” That was the Bible’s secret. What was “ten and ten”? Why did the
ghost come nightly to the inventor’s home? We found out, but it took us many
exciting days to solve the mystery.
Yes, if you like a spooky, shivery, mysterious story, you surely will enjoy this
book, my fifth one.
Here are the titles of my five books in their order:
JERRY TODD AND THE WHISPERING MUMMY
JERRY TODD AND THE ROSE-COLORED CAT
JERRY TODD AND THE OAK ISLAND TREASURE

JERRY TODD AND THE WALTZING HEN
JERRY TODD AND THE TALKING FROG [vii]
My sixth book will be JERRY TODD AND THE PURRING EGG. This dodo egg,
taken from King Tut’s tomb, was more than three thousand years old. The Tutter
newspaper called it the “million-dollar egg.” Could it be rejuvenated? One man
said so. The story of what happened when the egg was “rejuvenated” makes
mighty good reading for a boy who likes a book packed full of chuckles and
mysterious tangles.
Your friend,
Jerry Todd. [viii]
[Contents]
OUR CHATTER-BOX
W
hen I started writing books for boys (this is Leo Edwards speaking) I
was practically unknown in the story-writing world. Never having heard
of me, boys didn’t know whether to buy my books or not. The titles,
featuring Whispering Mummies and Purring Eggs, seemed kind of silly to a lot of
young readers. But to-day hundreds of thousands of boys look forward to my
new titles. If the books are slow in coming, a goodly portion of these hundreds
of thousands of “fans” write and tell me about it. Also they jack me up if things
aren’t so-so. And, happier for me, they pat me on the back (verbally) if they like
my stuff. I never tire of reading these bully good letters. And I was tickled pink
when my publisher told me that I could incorporate a few of these letters in a
“Chatter-Box.” An experiment, the first “Chatter-Box” appeared in my sixteenth
book. And so popular has this department become (it is made up almost wholly
of letters, poems and miscellaneous contributions from boys and girls who read
my books) that now I have been given the pleasing job of supplying my earlier
books with brief “Chatter-Boxes.” Writers of accepted poems, built around the
characters in my books, or featuring some boyish interest, win prizes. And, of
course, it is pleasing to other boys to see their letters in print. If you have
written me a letter I may have used it in another “Chatter-Box.” Or if you are
contemplating a letter, why not write it to-day? It may be just the letter I need
for one of the big “Chatter-Boxes” in my new books. It may even give me an
idea, for my books, which will bring millions of added laughs into the world.
[Contents]
LETTERS
“I
have read every book you published, including the Trigger Berg books,”
writes Philip Horsting of Brooklyn, N. Y., “and I like them all. [ix]Trigger
Berg can get into mischief faster than any boy I know. I think that the
‘Chatter-Box’ is a very good idea and while I’m writing this letter my aunt is
reading the latest ‘Chatter-Box’ right now.”
“I just read Andy Blake’s Secret Service,” writes Bill Hopwood of Primos, Pa.,
“and there’s something in the book I don’t understand. When Eddie Garry’s
uncle, with whom Eddie was living, told Andy that the latter’s father was his
younger brother, and Eddie’s father’s twin, how come that Andy’s name is Blake
and Eddie’s name is Garry? Did Andy’s father go under a false name?”
Yes, Bill, when Andy’s father ran away from home, determined never to have
anything more to do with his own people, he dropped the name of Garry and
took the name of Blake. By rights, we should call Andy by his true name. But he
prefers to keep the name he has known all his life. So we’ll continue to speak of
him as Andy Blake instead of Andy Garry.
“Not long ago,” writes Dub Moritin of Dallas, Texas, “I was reading one of your
Jerry Todd books and I saw where you had a Freckled Goldfish club. Gee, Mr.
Edwards, I sure would like to join! The boys call me Dub. If you want to call me
that, it’s OK with me. I have six Todd and two Ott books. I save my weekly
spending money and if I haven’t enough Mom gives me the rest. For both Mom
and Dad are crazy about your books. I am sending the two two-cent stamps to
join your club.”
“I am trying to get another boy besides myself to join the Freckled Goldfish
club,” writes Charles F. Spiro of Yonkers, N. Y. “I told him what an honor it was
to be a Freckled Goldfish. The kids living near me use the number thirteen for a
danger cry just like Jerry and his gang.”
“Some day I’m going to break a rotten egg to see how it smells,” writes John F.
McIntyre of Natchez, Miss. “Then I can prove it to my brother who is a dummy
and said Jerry and Poppy wasn’t any account. Gr-r-r-r-r! I feel like biting his
head off. If I did it wouldn’t be anything gone. Is it very easy to write a book? If
so, would you please tell me how to do it? I am joining the Freckled Goldfish
lodge to get my name in the big book.”
Well, John, I don’t know what you’re going to prove by breaking a rotten egg.
But if you’ll gain anything by it, in proving to your older brother that Jerry and
Poppy are worth-while pals, go ahead. I assure you that it would be very hard
indeed for a small boy to write a book. We have to live a good many years, and
[x]learn a lot about the world and its ways, before we can write interesting
books. But if you want to get some pointers on story writing see my first
“Chatter-Box” in Poppy Ott and the Tittering Totem.
“The boys around my neighborhood were always talking about how spooky and
funny your books were,” writes Carl A. Swanson of Minneapolis, Minn. “I never
had read one of your books. But I decided to read one to see if it was as good
as my friends had said. Boy, was it ever hot! It was Poppy Ott and the Freckled
Goldfish. I just got Poppy Ott and the Tittering Totem Saturday and I laughed so
much Sunday reading it that both my grandmother and my dad started reading
it.”
“I would like to join the Secret and Mysterious Order of the Freckled Goldfish,”
writes Mortimer A. Stiller of New York, N. Y. “Jerry, Poppy and Trigger are my
best pals. I agree with whoever said: ‘He that loveth a book will never want a
faithful friend,’ only, of course, I find more than one friend in your books. Your
latest idea of having a ‘Chatter-Box’ in each book is great. As I live in the city
the only thing that I can do that you mention is to start a local Goldfish chapter,
so please send me the necessary booklets.”
“I have just finished reading Andy Blake’s Comet Coaster,” writes Jack Pattee of
Chicago, Ill. “I liked the book very much but I like Jerry Todd better. Before I
read Andy Blake I read Trigger Berg and His 700 Mouse Traps. That was a swell
book, only it didn’t have a mystery. I have a friend, Jerry O’Neil, and he told me
that he wrote to you and you are going to put his letter in the ‘Chatter-Box’ in
Jerry Todd, Editor-in-Grief. I am a Freckled Goldfish and I read most of your
books. I have a small black dog named Gertie who likes gumdrops, candy and
chocolate doughnuts.”
[Contents]
FRECKLED GOLDFISH
O
ut of my book, Poppy Ott and the Freckled Goldfish, has grown our great
Freckled Goldfish lodge, membership in which is open to all boys and
girls who are interested in my books. Thousands of readers have joined
the club. We have peachy membership cards (designed by Bert Salg, the
popular illustrator of my books) and fancy buttons. Also for members who want
to organize branch clubs (hundreds are in successful operation, providing boys
and girls with added fun) we have rituals.
To join (and to be a loyal Jerry Todd fan I think you ought to join), please
observe these simple rules:
(1) Write (or print) your name plainly. [xi]
(2) Supply your complete printed address.
(3) Give your age.
(4) Enclose two two-cent postage stamps (for card and button).
(5) Address your letter to
Leo Edwards,
Cambridge,
Wisconsin.
[Contents]
LOCAL CHAPTERS
T
o help young organizers we have produced a printed ritual, which any
member who wants to start a Freckled Goldfish club in his own
neighborhood can’t afford to be without. This booklet tells how to
organize the club, how to conduct meetings, how to transact all club business,
and, probably most important of all, how to initiate candidates.
The complete initiation is given word for word. Naturally, these booklets are
more or less secret. So, if you send for one, please do not show it to anyone
who isn’t a Freckled Goldfish. Three chief officers will be required to put on the
initiation, which can be given in any member’s home, so, unless each officer is
provided with a booklet, much memorizing will have to be done. The best plan is
to have three booklets to a chapter. These may be secured (at cost) at six cents
each (three two-cent stamps) or three for sixteen cents (eight two-cent
stamps). Address all orders to Leo Edwards, Cambridge, Wisconsin.
[Contents]
CLUB NEWS
“W
e have eleven members in our Pool,” writes Gold Fin Samuel
Ferguson of Philadelphia, Pa., “and at almost every meeting we
have visitors. I am enclosing a cipher code that we use in writing
secret messages.”
Also it is Sam’s suggestion that we have a booklet printed giving an official

Freckled Goldfish secret code, then members can write to one another in secret.
How many members of our club would like to possess such a booklet? Let me
know as soon as possible. And if there is sufficient demand, we may produce
one. But you fellows have got to show me that there is a demand for the
booklet before we go ahead with it. Another boy suggested that we have such a
booklet and then print part of “Our Chatter-Box” in code. How does that strike
you?
“We now have a Freckled Goldfish song, yells, a jazz band composed of tin cans
and our Pool is decorated swell,” writes Gold Fin Francis Smith of Chambersburg,
Pa. “Also we have two goldfish, named Leo and Freckles.”
I suppose I ought to send my namesake a present. What do you want, Francis,

a box of goldfish food or an angleworm?
Nancy Hannemann of Chicago, Ill., is, I think, our youngest member. Giving her
[xii]age as two, she confesses that the letter of application was written by her
brother, also a Freckled Goldfish.
“I have been a Freckled Goldfish for several months,” writes C. B. Andrews of

Oklahoma City, Okla. “It is a secret and mysterious order, but nothing secret and
mysterious has been done yet. So I suggest that you write to each member,
telling him to join with other local members and do mysterious good turns. For
example, suppose some poor old lady in your neighborhood has a birthday.
Early in the morning before she is up and around, leave a couple of goldfish at
her door with a card reading: ‘With the compliments of the Secret and
Mysterious Order of the Freckled Goldfish.’ That would be pleasantly
mysterious.”
Which, I think, is a corking good suggestion.
The three happiest boys in Yankton, South Dakota, are Dan Schenk (G. F.), Joe
Dowling (S. F,) and Bob Seeley (F. F.). Not only have these boys organized a
successful Pool, but they have swell rotographed letterheads. The reproduction
of the “fish” is almost as good as Salg could do himself. Dan advises that the
Pool has its meetings in an attic. Boy, I bet they have fun!
“Our Freckled Goldfish club,” writes Ernest Smith of Alhambra, Calif., “has an
orchestra consisting of a violin, saxophone, a jazzophone and a harmonica. All
of the boys playing in the orchestra are Freckled Goldfish.”
[Contents]
LEO’S PICTURE
A
nd had you heard, gang, about the marvelous piece of “art” that you can
get by sending ten cents in stamps to Grosset & Dunlap, 1140 Broadway,
New York, N. Y. Yah, the “art” referred to is Leo’s picture—and what a
wonderful bargain! Only ten cents for such a marvelous picture! [xiii]
[Contents]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Boy in the Tree 1

II The Talking Frog 8
III An Unknown Prowler 18
IV We Take the Frog to School 27
V Bubbles of Beauty 41
VI The Mysterious Soap Man 52
VII What Scoop Did 62
VIII In the Old Mill 71
IX The Mystery Deepens 83
X A Surprise 95
XI The Bible’s Secret 103
XII So Beautiful! 114
XIII Up a Rope 129
XIV Felix Gennor, Jr. 142
XV The Prisoner 150
XVI Chased by a Ghost 168
XVII The Crazy Puzzle Room 173
XVIII The Ten-Ring Puzzle 182
XIX Scoop Disappears 192
XX Up the River 197
XXI Fishing! 213
XXII We Capture the Ghost 222
[xiv]
[Contents]
LEO EDWARDS’ BOOKS
Here is a list of Leo Edwards’ published books:
THE JERRY TODD SERIES
Jerry Todd and the Whispering Mummy

Jerry Todd and the Rose-Colored Cat
Jerry Todd and the Oak Island Treasure
Jerry Todd and the Waltzing Hen
Jerry Todd and the Talking Frog
Jerry Todd and the Purring Egg
Jerry Todd in the Whispering Cave
Jerry Todd, Pirate
Jerry Todd and the Bob-Tailed Elephant
Jerry Todd, Editor-in-Grief
Jerry Todd, Caveman
Jerry Todd and the Flying Flapdoodle
Jerry Todd and the Buffalo Bill Bathtub
Jerry Todd’s Up-the-Ladder Club
Jerry Todd’s Poodle Parlor
THE POPPY OTT SERIES
Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot

Poppy Ott’s Seven-League Stilts
Poppy Ott and the Galloping Snail
Poppy Ott’s Pedigreed Pickles
Poppy Ott and the Freckled Goldfish
Poppy Ott and the Tittering Totem
Poppy Ott and the Prancing Pancake
Poppy Ott Hits the Trail
Poppy Ott & Co., Inferior Decorators
THE NEW POPPY OTT DETECTIVE STORIES
The Monkey’s Paw

The Hidden Dwarf
[1]
[Contents]
JERRY TOD AND THE
TALKING FROG
CHAPTER I
THE BOY IN THE TREE
I got into the bushes quick as scat. Biting hard on my breath, sort of.
For right there in front of our eyes was a regular old gee-whacker of
a dinosaur. Bigger than the town water tower and the Methodist
Church steeple put together. I tell you it was risky for us.
My chum got ready with his trusty bow and arrow.
“Do you think you can hit him in the heart?” I said, excited-like,
squinting ahead to where the dinosaur was dragging his slimy body
out of the pond.
Scoop Ellery’s face was rigid.
“Got to,” he said, steady-like. “If I miss, he’ll turn on us and kill us
both.” [2]
“It’s a lucky thing for Red and Peg,” I said, thinking of my other
chums, “that they aren’t in it.”
“They’ll miss us,” said Scoop, “if we get killed.”
My thoughts took a crazy jump.
“Why not aim for a tickly spot in his ribs,” I snickered, pointing to the
dinosaur, “and let him giggle himself to death?”
“Sh-h-h-h!” cautioned Scoop, putting out a hand. “He’s listening. The

wind is blowing that way. He smells us.”
“What of it?” I grinned. “We don’t smell bad.”

“Keep still,” scowled Scoop, “while I aim.”
Bing! went the bow cord. My eyes followed the arrow. It struck. The
old dinosaur angrily tooted his horn. But he didn’t drop dead. For his
hide was sixteen inches thick.
We were lost! Scoop said so. And without arguing the matter I went
lickety-cut for a tree.
“Come on!” I yipped over my shoulder. “He’s after us.”
Up the tree I went monkey-fashion. And when I straddled a limb and

squinted down, there [3]was the old dinosaur chewing my footprints
off the tree trunk.
“How much longer have we got to live?” I panted.
“Two minutes and fifteen seconds,” informed Scoop, who, of course,

had followed me into the tree.
“I can’t die that quick,” I told him. “For I’m all out of wind.”
But he was squinting down at the dinosaur and seemed not to hear
me.
“He’s got his trunk coiled around the tree,” he said. “Feel it shake!
He’s pulling it up by the roots.”
“Wait a minute; wait a minute,” I said, motioning the other down.

“You’re getting things muddled. A dinosaur hasn’t got a trunk. This
must be a hairy elephant.”
“Climb higher,” cried Scoop. “He’s reaching for us.”
So up we went.
All of a sudden I heard some one go, “Hem-m-m!” And what do you
know if there wasn’t another boy in the top of the tree! A stranger.
About our age.
“You had me guessing,” he said, grinning [4]good-natured-like. “I

thought at first you were crazy.”
Staring, I finally managed to get my tongue unhooked.
“Where’d you come from?” I bit off, letting my face go dark. For he
didn’t belong in our dinosaur game. And I wanted him to know it.
Instead of answering, he inquired pleasantly:
“Was that a cow that chased you up the tree?”
“Huh!” I grunted, letting myself go stiff. “Do you suppose we’d run
from a cow?”
“It made a noise like a cow,” he grinned, “when you shot it with your
toy bow and arrow.”
“It’s a dinosaur,” I scowled.
His grin spread wider.
“And it was a dodo bird,” he said, “that picked me up by the seat of

the pants and dropped me in the top of this tree.”
Well, that kind of took my breath. And I glared at him for a moment
or two. Then his steady, friendly grin put me to laughing.
“I saw you coming through the woods,” he said after a moment. “I

couldn’t quite figure out what you were doing. So I climbed up here
to watch.”
Something poked a green snout from the stranger’s right-hand coat
pocket. [5]
“Are you after frogs, too?” he inquired, following my eyes.
“Frogs?” I repeated, staring harder at the squirming pocket.
He pointed down to the pond in the ravine.
“It’s full of frogs,” he told me. “Big fellows. See?” and producing an
old lunker of a bullfrog he held it up.
“Hello!” he said.
“K-k-kroak!” responded the frog.
The boy laughed.
“Perfect,” he said, patting the frog on the head. “Now say it in

Chinese. Hello!”
“K-k-kroak!”
The grinning eyes looked into mine.
“Would you like to hear him say it in Yiddish?”
“I’d like to make a meal of his fried legs,” I returned.
“You can have him,” the other offered. Then, without another word,
he let himself down limb by limb, scooting in the direction of town, a
mile away.
Scoop gave a queer throat sound and came out of his thoughts.
“That’s the new kid,” he said.

52045

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

52045

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

52045

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Download the full version of the ebook at

Playing with Dynamite A Personal Approach to

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookultra.com

New Horizons in Forensic Psychotherapy Exploring the Work

Dynamite The Story of Class Violence In America Louis

Playing the Unconscious Psychoanalytic Interviews with

The Craft of Piano Playing A New Approach to Piano

Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique A Lacanian

The Origins of Unhappiness A New Understanding of Personal

Dictionary of Russian Personal Names With a Guide to

Playing Hard at Life A Relational Approach to Treating

Violence: A Public Health Menace and a Public Health Approach

Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series

Published 2018 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2011 by Estela V. Welldon

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 9781855757424 (pbk)

An interview with Estela V. Welldon, July 1996 1

An interview with Estela V. Welldon, July 1999 98

An interview with Estela V. Welldon, November 2010 252

I have learned much from my teachers and senior colleagues in the

together the Practical Guide to Forensic Psychotherapy. Its publication

The modern discipline of forensic psychotherapy, which can be de-

overwhelming struggle with the problems of delinquency and crime,

Chapters 8 and 9 examine the relationship of forensic psychother-

forms of therapeutic intervention, speciﬁcally group psychotherapy

ranging from her study of the perverse transference, to the role of

Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC

the internal and external factors inﬂuencing the behaviour of criminal

denigration of these mothers. It is very appropriate that the book in

limitations of our current knowledge as to how to prevent violence,

psychotherapy (which assumes a mixture of rationality and irration-

In other words, just as we forensic psychotherapists need to over-

to become a psychiatrist. I must add that I could only do my medical

as other departments were envious of the prosperity and reputation

I wasn’t a member of a particular church and I had received by mail

A: That’s right. The other shocking situation was that, while in

My English began to develop in funny ways, as you can see, but

psychodynamic ﬁeld or with forensic patients. Another shock was that

Title: Jerry Todd and the Talking Frog

Author: Leo Edwards

Illustrator: Bert Salg

Release date: March 5, 2022 [eBook #67564]

Original publication: United States: Grosset & Dunlap

Credits: Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

THE JERRY TODD BOOKS, ETC.

Like my other books, this is a fun-mystery-adventure story. The “fun” part is

Here are the titles of my five books in their order:

JERRY TODD AND THE WHISPERING MUMMY

JERRY TODD AND THE ROSE-COLORED CAT

JERRY TODD AND THE OAK ISLAND TREASURE

JERRY TODD AND THE TALKING FROG [vii]

(1) Write (or print) your name plainly. [xi]

(2) Supply your complete printed address.

(3) Give your age.

(5) Address your letter to

Also it is Sam’s suggestion that we have a booklet printed giving an official

I suppose I ought to send my namesake a present. What do you want, Francis,

“I have been a Freckled Goldfish for several months,” writes C. B. Andrews of