Who was Margot Cutner?
Cutner was a Jungian analyst and a 1950s pioneer in psychedelics research
In a new blogpost for the Journal of Analytical Psychology website and a recent paper in the September issue of the Journal, I write about the British psychiatrist Ronald Sandison (1916-2010), who developed ground-breaking treatment protocols for working therapeutically with LSD during the 1950s. Sandison opened the world’s first purpose-built unit for LSD therapy at Powick hospital in Worcestershire in 1955 where Margot Cutner (1905-1987) worked alongside him as a colleague, seeing patients for therapy or analysis before and after their LSD sessions.
Cutner, née Kuttner, was a German national of Jewish heritage. She completed a PhD in philosophy in Hamburg in 1936 before fleeing the Nazis during their rise to power. Cutner settled in England, where she trained in somatics with Elsa Gindler and where she joined the newly incorporated Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) in 1948, proposed by Gerhard Adler, another German national of Jewish descent. Adler had trained with C. G. Jung in Zürich during the 1930s and he was a founding member of the SAP, established in 1945 under Jung’s honorary presidency.
Sadly, there is limited information about Cutner in the SAP archive. However, we do know that in 1957, Cutner gave a talk about her work at Powick to SAP members and two years later, she published a paper in Psychiatric Quarterly, titled Analytic work with LSD-25, based on her earlier SAP talk. In 1960, Cutner sent Sandison a copy of her paper, printed as a stand-alone pamphlet, accompanied by handwritten letter saying: “Publication dragged on, until I almost thought it would never come off.” In his archive of papers held at the Wellcome Collection, Sandison described Cutner’s pamphlet as “[o]ne of the best papers in my possession, written by a Jungian analyst.”
Cutner’s paper presented the use of LSD as “an aid to deep analysis” and appraised the “psychological changes produced by LSD from the viewpoint of dynamic psychology” by taking a Jungian approach to her clinical material. She tackled “the effect of the transference situation and the role played by the analyst who administers the drug,” as well as regression and physical touch, use of interpretation, the amount of time spent with the patient, and the suitability of groups for integration work. Regarding the frequency of LSD doses, Cutner stated: “The writer’s aim has always been to use it as sparingly as possible and to keep the main accent on the analysis itself.”
After three years at Powick, Cutner noticed “more often than would be due to pure chance, that the material emerging under LSD, far from being chaotic reveals, on the contrary, a definite relationship to the psychological needs of the patient at the moment of his taking the drug.”
She went on:
[T]he phenomenon observable under LSD seems to confirm, even more clearly than those observed in general analysis, Jung’s idea of the psyche as a self-regulating system, in which unconscious activities function as compensatory factors in the service of striving towards wholeness. The teleological factor introduced by Jung into the concept of the unconscious seem to become more obvious when one has the chance of observing reactions to LSD in a fairly large number of patients for several years. Looking at the material obtained in this way, it appears as if something like an autonomous selective process is at work, determining the sequence of the emerging material in a purposive way-as if whatever emerges is just what is “needed” for any particular patient at any particular time, as a factor complementing the conscious personality.
Although Cutner believed that therapeutic work with LSD was consistent with Jungian principles, Jung was personally opposed to the use of mescaline and LSD to support the individuation process because he thought the drugs might evoke too much material from the collective unconscious at any one time, overwhelming an individual’s capacity to integrate this material. Among Jung’s stated concerns about the use of hallucinogenics was the potential to trigger a latent psychosis. Cutner was also aware of the risk but she found that a greater danger lay in the possibility that unconscious imagery produced during an LSD trip may remain unassimilated, “like ‘undigested lumps,’ often charged with anxiety, in the patient’s psychic system” thereby inhibiting “further psychological development.” Cutner argued that this scenario could be mitigated “as long as the analyst is present during the crucial experiences and can represent the integrating ego-function for the patient.”
Despite Jung’s objections to psychedelic-assisted therapy, Cutner developed pioneering early protocols for therapeutic treatment with LSD, and together with Sandison, she was unique in applying Jungian concepts to her work. Scott Hill, author of Confrontation with the Unconscious: Jungian depth psychology and psychedelic experience, sees the endeavours of Cutner and Sandison at Powick as “notable exceptions to the Jungian community’s emphatic remove from psychedelic investigation in the 1950s and 1960s.” In the words of Zoë Dubus, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, Cutner “devised a therapeutic approach… that was comprehensive, benevolent, and non-intrusive, and that broke radically with traditional methods.”
I look forward to learning more about Cutner in due course, when Zoë Dubus publishes her current research about Cutner’s impact on the concept of “set and setting” in the history of psychedelic treatments.
Margot Cutner’s letter to Ronald Sandison is quoted here with kind permission from the Wellcome Collection (PP/SAN/B/1/1).