Phyllis Grosskurth

(b.1924). Born Phyllis Langstaff in Toronto, Ontario, Grosskurth was educated there at St Clement's School and the University of Toronto (B.A., 1946), and at the University of Ottawa (M.A., 1960) and the University of London (Ph.D., 1962). Like that of many outstanding Canadian women academics of her generation, her career has combined child rearing, a return to academe for further study, and eventually the establishment of a distinguished career as teacher, scholar, and writer. In 1965 Grosskurth joined the English department of the University of Toronto, of which she is now Professor Emeritus, and where she was appointed to the Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought program in 1986. She has received fellowships and awards from the Canada Council and from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Laidlaw, and Killam foundations. In 1965 she won the University of British Columbia award for biography.

Grosskurth's dissertation for her Ph.D. was on ‘The literary criticism of John Addington Symonds’; within two years she had published John Addington Symonds: a biography (1964), for which she received a Governor General's Award. (It was published in the United States as The woeful Victorian: a biography of John Addington Symonds.) Grosskurth returned to Symonds in her edition of The memoirs of John Addington Symonds (1984). Symonds' circle included Leslie Stephen, about whom she published a monograph, Leslie Stephen (1968), one of the Writers and Their Work series sponsored by the British Council. Grosskurth has also written two other brief monographs, Gabrielle Roy (1969) and Margaret Mead: a life of controversy (1989), among countless articles, reviews, and journalistic pieces that have appeared internationally. Her principal works, however, are dense, carefully researched and argued, indeed monumental biographcal studies of three titans of psychoanalytic thought.

In Havelock Ellis: a biography (1980) Grosskurth explored the life and writings of the famous Victorian sexologist, and makes clear that Ellis's first important work, Sexual inversion, included parts of two pamphlets by Symonds, a homosexual, that strove to eradicate cruel prejudices towards, and misinformation about, homosexuality (the two authors originally planned to collaborate). For Melanie Klein: her world and her work (1986), the first biography of Klein, Grosskurth was obliged not only to master Klein's theories, and her contribution to psychoanalytic practice, but also to grasp her central role in the British psychoanalytic school. The author of The psychoanalysis of children, Klein emerges in Grosskurth's view as the figure in child psychoanalysis, far eclipsing Anna Freud in theoretical vision and practice. Nicholas Wright's play Mrs. Klein, which opened in London in 1988 and in New York in 1995, is based on Grosskurth's biography.

The secret ring: Freud's inner circle and the politics of psychoanalysis (1991) is a portrait of Freud's ‘secret committee’, which included, among others, Sandor Ferenczi, the great Hungarian who both encouraged and analysed Melanie Klein; Karl Abraham, whose analysand she was in Berlin; and Ernest Jones. Grosskurth's position is that the ‘subtext of psychoanalytic history is the story of how Freud manipulated and influenced his followers and successors’, binding them to him in a secret society, and privileging each with the gift of a ring, making Freud indeed the ‘ringmaster’. Yet for all Freud's undoubted power, the secret circle petered out in the 1920s amid acrimonious disputes. Grosskurth associates Freud with the tradition of nineteenth-century Romanticism, as if he saw himself as a Wagnerian hero. In Byron: the flawed angel (1997) she has portrayed perhaps the greatest Romantic, returning to a life in literature with a portrait of a man who, like Freud, ‘undid the values of the Enlightenment’.