Eric Graham Howe (3 February 1897 – 8 July 1975)Laing, Adrian (2006). R.D. Laing: A Life. Sutton Publishing. pp. 54, 59, 78–80. . . was a British psychiatrist notable for his early, interdisciplinary approach to psychotherapy in the 1930s, featuring elements of psychodynamic psychology, existential phenomenology, Eastern philosophy and Christian spirituality. After serving in World War I, he became interested in Sigmund Freud and decided to study psychiatry. Following medical school, he worked at the Tavistock Clinic in the 1920s and 1930s, and established the Open Way Clinic in the 1950s, later renamed the Langham Clinic. Towards the end of his life, he was known as a practicing Druid. He was the author of more than a dozen books, and was influential among writers and psychiatrists including Israel Regardie, Jean Lucey Pratt, Alan Watts, Henry Miller, and R.D. Laing.
Early life and education Eric Graham Howe was born in London on February 3, 1897, the twelfth child of his father John Foster Howe and his mother Caroline. Of his eleven other siblings, he had only one sister, Dora. Four of his brothers died before he was born while two more died later in World War I. His unpublished autobiography, The Autobiography of an Unwanted Man, details much of his early life. As a child, he had fond memories of the family dog and of "Clara", a sickly, adopted girl he referred to as his auntie. Clara was likely an orphan taken in as a promise by his family to a dying member of their church. Howe planned on receiving a scholarship to study mathematics when he came down with scarlet fever which ended his educational goals. Instead of school, he began working for an accounting firm at the age of 14.Stranger, William (Ed.). (2012). The Druid of Harley Street: Selected Writings of E. Graham Howe. Cobb: Dharma Café; Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. pp. 27, 30–35. . .
Britain was plunged into World War I in July 1914, leading Howe to lie about his age to join the army at the early age of 17.5. He enlisted in the Artists Rifles regiment of the British Army Reserve, where he served for the next six years. After the first six months, he became a commissioned officer in India, reaching the rank of Major in just a few years. By the end of the war, he was deployed to Vladivostok as part of the Siberian intervention during the revolution, where he learned the language. He returned home in 1920 and went to work for his brother in the shipping industry for several years. At some point he read the Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud (1924–1925), and decided to follow the same path as Freud. Although he never completed secondary school, he convinced the dean of St Thomas' Hospital to admit him conditional upon passing several exams. Howe received his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery and a degree in medical psychology at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School (University of London) in 1927.
Career After a residency at Bethlem Royal Hospital and Bowden House Clinic, Howe became an early founding member of the Tavistock Clinic (1926–1935) where he was also an instructor.Dicks, Henry Victor (2015). Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic. Hove UK: Routledge. pp. 35, 42, 333. . . Howe was a supporter of the work of Carl Jung (1875–1961).Burston, Daniel. (1996). The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p. 57. . . In 1935, Jung was invited by the Institute of Medical Psychology to give a lecture series at the clinic, which became known as the "London Seminars" or the "Tavistock Lectures". During the series, which occurred on five separate days from 30 September to 4 October, Howe and Jung got into a lively debate about the nature of intuition and other topics.Jung, C. G. (1976). "The Tavistock Lectures". In Adler, G. & R.F.C. Hull (Ed.). Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 18: The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings. Princeton University Press. pp. 27–28, 58–60, 62. . . After leaving Tavistock, Howe later established the Open Way Clinic (1953) in a centralized area of the West End. The clinic was adjacent to the Royal Society of Medicine and its community of psychoanalysts, and Harley Street, known for its private specialists. This location enabled the development of an intellectual social network, where professionals from various therapeutic communities gathered to exchange ideas.
Open Way was known to employ novel techniques including art and music therapies.Marshall, Janet (2016). Norman Motley: Portrait of a Man of Vision. Leicestershire: Matador. p. 33. . . In contrast, conventional biomedical psychiatry at the time treated patients with various forms of shock therapies, including insulin coma therapy, electroshocks, and other treatments, such as the lobotomy.Ferguson, Iain (2021). "R. D. Laing's The Divided Self: An Existential Study of Sanity and Madness (1965)". New Zealand Social Work. 33 (2): 56–60. Open Way later changed its name to the Langham Clinic, a psychotherapy treatment center featuring lectures, training, and workshops for therapists and analysts, and low-cost therapy sessions for patients. Notable participants included psychotherapists John Heaton, Joseph Berke, and Leon Redler, among others. Howe was a mentor to R. D. Laing (1927–1989), who became clinical director of Open Way in 1962.Edwards, Ian Charles. (2006). Truth as Relationship: The Psychology of E. Graham Howe. (PhD thesis). Duquesne University. As the counterculture of the 1960s progressed, Howe disagreed with Laing's use of LSD in psychedelic therapy and had him removed from the Langham Clinic in 1965. Cooper et al. of the Philadelphia Association summarize Howe's position: "Although Laing did not take up the view that psychedelics should be used in psychiatry, Howe believed LSD could be dangerous, even a cheap con, and that Laing's interest in it was misplaced."Cooper, Robin; Gans, Steven; Heaton, J.M.; Oakley, Haya; Zeal, Paul (1989). "Beginnings". Thresholds between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Papers from the Philadelphia Association. London: Free Association Books. p. 17-19. . . The psychologist Ian C. Edwards believes that Howe's opinion of psychedelics was informed by Jiddu Krishnamurti's strict, anti-psychedelic drug position, which viewed drugs as only making people comfortable, not truly free.
Work Howe's early work, Motives and Mechanisms of the Mind (1931), is based on a series of lectures he delivered the previous year. The material is derived from patient case studies and clinical work Howe performed at the Tavistock Square Clinic and St. Thomas's Hospital.Howe, E. Graham (1931). Motives and Mechanisms of the Mind: An Introduction to Psychopathology and Applied Psychology. London: The Lancet. . The book is unusual for its time as an academic publication as it deliberately avoids citing sources or using footnotes and only contains an index for reference. Howe's ideas are rooted in psychodynamic psychology and informed by the theories of Freud, Alfred Adler, and Jung, but his style is classified as existentialist and phenomenological. The book was later serialized by The Lancet. According to Ian C. Edwards, it is a significant work for Howe, as it shows him attempting to describe psychoanalytic theory while also pursuing nontraditional methods for treating psychological disorders.
Morality and Reality (1934), a book about parenting, was originally given as a series of five lectures in 1934 to the Home and School Council of Great Britain. It was later rewritten and republished in several revised editions (1935, 1938) with the title Time and the Child. In the book, Howe identifies as a medical psychologist, not as a philosopher, while discussing the limits of descriptive science, but also upholding its necessity. "Of all the sciences," writes Howe, "That of psychology stands most in danger of being imprisoned within the artificial boundaries of its own conventional moralities. The phenomena of mind are as large as life, and it is much to expect of any science that it should be big enough to include all life within its scope."Howe, E. Graham (1938). Time and the Child. Faber & Faber. . The book was well received by reviewer M. Hamblin Smith in the Journal of Mental ScienceSmith, M. H. (1934). "Morality and Reality. By E. Graham Howe". Journal of Mental Science. 80 (330): 578–578. . and in the Postgraduate Medical Journal."Morality and Reality". Postgrad Med J.. 10 (106): 306. August 1934. .
Where this War Hits You: Four Broadcast Talks (1941) was originally broadcast by the BBC during World War II as a series of four episodes: "Cross Purposes", "Create and Share", "How Long", and "The Great Unseen". After it was compiled into a book, it was reviewed favorably. J. Kruisheer found "How Long" to be the best in the series. Focusing on the philosophy of time, "How Long" reiterates the popular notion of the "Eternal Now", a kind of timelessness where past, present, and future are all contained in the present moment.Kruisheer, J. (July 1942). "Book Reviews". The Theosophist. Theosophical Society. (10): 320. Helen Liddell notes that Howe's themes of creativity and democracy in the book share the same sentiments in similar works by Peter Drucker and Julian Huxley.Liddell, Helen (September 1941). "War Aims and Peace Aims V". International Affairs Review Supplement. 19 (6): 299–308.
Victor White, an English Dominican priest and collaborator with Jung, reviewed Howe's The Triumphant Spirit. A Study of Depression (1944) for the theological journal Blackfriars, criticizing it as a form of pseudo-psychology that deviated from Jung's ideas.White, Victor (April 1944). "Review". Blackfriars. 25 (289): 148–149. Quotes about Buddhism from Howe in his book Invisible Anatomy (1944) were later incorporated into Theravada Buddhist outreach literature. In the late 1940s, Anglican theologian J. Stafford Wright characterized Howe as a Buddhist in The Churchman, but Howe took issue with this description and denied it, leading Frank Colquhoun to issue a retraction.Wright, J. Stafford (1949). "The Inner Experience of the Holy Spirit – Its Relation to Mysticism". The Churchman. 63 (1): 13–20. Colquhoun, Frank (1949). "Editorial". The Churchman. 63 (2): 67–68. In the 1950s, Howe lectured at the Buddhist SocietyHumphreys, Christmas (1978). Both Sides of the Circle: The Autobiography of Christmas Humphreys. Routledge. p. 198. . . and was acquainted with Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist Nyanaponika Thera.Laing, R. D.; Mullan, Bob (1995). Mad to Be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing. London: Free Association Books. p. 236. . . Howe wrote the forward to the first English language edition of Thera's book The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1956).Scaligero, Massimo (September 1959). "Satipatthana. The Heart of Buddhist Meditation by Nyanaponika Thera". East and West. 10 (3): 230–231. According to Christmas Humphreys, Howe was partially responsible for bringing Edward Conze to Buddhism.Humphreys, Christmas (Autumn 1980). "Edward Conze, 1904–1979". The Eastern Buddhist. 13 (2): 147–148. Howe's book, Cure or Heal? (1965), focused on Hindu philosophy and the use of Chakra psychology and its potential applications in psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine.Bennet, E. A. (5 March 1966). "Review: Hindu Ideas". The British Medical Journal. 1 (5487): 599. Richard W. Crocket positively reviewed the book for the British Journal of Psychiatry.Crocket, Richard W. (1966). "Cure or Heal? A Study of Therapeutic Experience. By E. Graham Howe". British Journal of Psychiatry. 112 (487): 648–649. .
Later life