Page 7 - Winter 16

President’s letter
by Jane Keogh
I sincerely hope that by the time you are reading this, the madness of the last few weeks will be a distant memory.
As I write, homeopathy seems to be under attack on all fronts, with Simon Singh gunning for the Department of Health and wanting homeopathy removed from the NHS to Danny Chambers MRCVS creating a petition on Change.org to lobby the RVC to ban vets practising homeopathy. As if this was not enough, the news broke that a vet who uses homeopathy has been prosecuted by the RSPCA for failing to provide adequate pain relief and nursing to a dog injured in a road traffic accident. Appalling timing, and no doubt our cries of "bad vetting" not "bad homeopathy" will go unheard in the media stampede to exploit this case.
However, time has a habit of putting things in perspective, and I am confident that our own committee can deal with this on your behalf, and that the wider ramifications are already being dealt with by the 4 Homeopathy group. Writing in advance, I cannot see yet how this will pan out, but even in the midst of the storm I know that a strong defence is being mounted, and even possibly an attack in our own right. We will defend our corner ably.
Given this present climate of negativity, it seems all the more important to support each other in whatever way we can. I would therefore urge you to sign up for the Spring Meeting at the Friends Meeting House in London on February 27th. Details are on the web site, and I hope that as many of you as possible will take the opportunity not only to hear some exciting homeopathy, but also to meet up and re- connect with friends and colleagues. We are a small community and it is all too easy to feel isolated, especially when our whole way of life is under
attack. I cannot stress too strongly
how hugely valuable our meetings
and conferences are for bringing
like-minded souls together and
providing, if only for a while, a safe
space to share stories, find support
and empathy and to remember
just, why we continue to tread this rocky road. We may be small in numbers, but our connection is enormously powerful.
With that in mind I would urge you to sign up for the Conference in Bath 9 – 11 September 2016. Organised by Nick (Thompson) and Geoff (Johnson) it is sure to be a feast of great homeopathy and connection to friends, old and new; a real opportunity to recharge your homeopathic batteries.
I would also remind you once again of Homeopathy Awareness Week (HAW), 10th to 16th April 2016. This is a chance to put our case for our amazing healing modality to a wider audience. It is also a chance to hold our heads up in the face of adversity and refuse to be cowed. There will be a wealth of support material on the "Find a Homeopath" website (which is the official 4H website) and I would urge you to make use of it to increase awareness of homeopathy in your practice.
It only remains for me to encourage you to get out and enjoy the early Spring weather (or early Autumn for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere) and reconnect with the bigger picture. In the end, we are all One, each of us shining our individual light, so that together we create a beacon in the darkness. Keep shining!
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consequence of the enforced separation from their families, and especially from their mothers. Winnicott saw that this separation caused a deprivation due to this loss of contact and resulted in what he termed a greediness, which could only be met somehow in their new foster home environment, but also, he saw that in many cases the children developed an antisocial tendency:
“At the basis of the antisocial tendency is a good early experience that has been lost ... it is an essential feature that the infant has reached to a capacity to perceive that the cause of the disaster lies in an environmental failure. [Winnicott’s emphasis] Correct knowledge that the cause of the depression or disintegration is an external one, and not an internal one, is responsible for the personality distortion and for the urge to seek for a cure by new environmental provision. The state of ego maturity enabling perception of this kind determines the development of an antisocial tendency instead of a psychotic illness.” 1 [my emphasis]
He then goes on to say that “the treatment of the antisocial tendency is ... the provision of child care which can be rediscovered by the child ... it is the stability of the new environmental perception which gives the therapeutics.” 2 In other words, when a child loses her family, her only hope to resolve the ensuing deprivation is to bond to a new mother figure. This deprived child develops what
Winnicott calls a greed, and she seeks for someone or something to fill that void. “The greediness is part of the infant’s compulsion to seek for a cure from the mother who caused the deprivation. The greediness is antisocial ...” 3
So all those cute hugging animals? Yep. Deprived, desperately greedy and needy, and humans were all that was available to fill this desperate need.
This, of course, is easy enough to understand, and perhaps we can even be grateful that at least they had kind humans from which to obtain the external therapeutic relationship. For this we have sympathy.
But what about cats and dogs? Are you beginning to squirm? Can you see now why we take them from their mothers at such a young age, but not too young? We surely do not want psychotic animals, which we sometimes see when they lose their mothers too young, as when they must be hand raised and bottle fed because their mother died at birth or shortly thereafter. As Winnicott’s writing implies, these animals experience loss before the ego maturity allows them to see the loss as external to them rather than an intrinsic defect, so they become psychotic.
But the next stage, after sufficient ego development to first recognise the mother as a separate individual and then recognise the loss, is the perfect stage to take a puppy away. But why? We have said that this allows bonding to humans because, after a certain age (12-20 weeks or so as I recall), they no longer accept
new species as part of their environment, as if their brains are no longer capable of integrating new ideas. Is this so?
Or could it be that this perfect age spread for adoption, six to twelve weeks, is actually the perfect age for inducing deprivation and an antisocial tendency, thus requiring the poor animals to find some other source of emotional nourishment, necessitating a bond to humans? Can we not define the very act of a dog or cat sleeping with a human as antisocial behaviour? Wouldn’t a normal, healthy dog wish to sleep with other dogs?
Personally, these questions cause me to lose sleep.
1, 2, 3 Winnicott, D. W. Deprivation and Delinquency. London, Tavistock Publications, 1984, pp 127-130.
Don Hamilton, DVM has practiced veterinary medicine for 36 years and veterinary homeopathy for over 25 years. He is the author of Homeopathic Care for Cats and Dogs: Small Doses for Small Animals. He will present on the human-animal relationship at the upcoming BAHVS conference in Bath in September 2016.
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