Publisher's Synopsis
This account of my life is essentially episodic in nature, using William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience as a very loose framework. The story is about the battle most of us face at critical times in our lives between the contrary states of creativity and destruction, love and hate and living and dying. It invites the reader to identify with me in my quest to know why I, like so many women, have felt bound by invisible constraints, held down by authority, voiceless. What is the cause? Does it matter that we should know?
The exploration is elucidated via the use of diaries kept during and after a five year period of psychoanalysis, fragments of dreams, and copies of correspondence between family and friends. Within the theme of Innocent Beginnings I track childhood memories from the early forties to the early fifties, describing an awakening to some of the big life issues: illness, betrayal, birth, sex, death. Within the theme of Experience I move to an exploration of key authority figures: father, first lover, employers and how they have contributed to, or countered, long term depression.
The years of psychotherapy were followed by a joyful period of personal and work fulfilment, marriage and motherhood. I later describe the anguished times relating to the death of one of my students and some time after that my own daughter's attempted suicide. I consider the way these redefining experiences shape the memoir as they have shaped my life, and have helped to provide, admittedly tentative, answers to the questions I have set out to explore.
As a child Phoebe was brought up in a pacifist community near Colchester, Essex during the 1940s. She has had a varied career working first in London as personal secretary to a Labour MP, Tom Driberg, before going to the United States to work at Harvard University initially at the Loeb Drama Center and then as personal secretary to Henry Kissinger, then Professor of Government at the Center for International Affairs. On her return to the UK she worked as a researcher before moving into her life-time love, adult education. This included organizing and teaching literature on the Fresh Horizons programme at the City Li in the 1970s before moving to Hillcroft Adult Residential College for Women where she was principal from 1982 to 1990. She continued her career as head of the Adult Education Service within the Liverpool City Council before moving to Liverpool John Moores University to become head of Student Services.
She trained in her mid fifties as a counsellor, practising in Liverpool, Norwich and London. She recently completed her doctoral thesis on the under-researched area of client perceptions of counselling.
She now lives in Battersea, London, near the River Thames but retains her childhood links with East Anglia, expressing a particular love of the estuary and coastal areas of Wivenhoe and West Mersea.
