The quintessentially British boarding school, designed to produce the ‘English gentleman,” was dismissed in the 1960s by child psychoanalyst John Bowlby, as “time-honoured barbarism”. The system which had generated a long roll-call of British prime ministers, had never been debunked by any literature on the psychological impact of boarding schools.
Until Jungian psychoanalyst and art therapist Joy Schaverein published her acclaimed book, Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child, (Routledge, 2015). Joy Schaverein who has died aged 82, following a stroke, worked on her project during Etonian David Cameron’s time as prime minister, and knew the risks of “going up against the establishment”, as she put it. “There is a huge social pressure not to complain about what is generally seen as a benefit of privilege,” she said.
The book was lauded, not just for its clinical analysis, but because it launched a cultural and intellectual debate among its readership – adult survivors of the English middle class propensity to send children away to an alien environment while still young and impressionable. To her boarding school was a peculiar abuse of the British establishment. She felt it was like putting a child into care. Her book cited Roald Dahl and George Orwell’s experiences where she explained that growing up in an institution without much love or appropriate touch, could lead to depression, broken relationships and problems with intimacy. Young boys separated from their mothers, she suggested, could develop an unconscious fear of women.
“Children need to grow among people who love them,” she said in 2011. “Things have improved but children are still exposed to regimented lifestyles, loneliness and separation. They often turn into very successful adults...but they can suffer from a poverty of emotion.”
Schaverein’s book considered the negative values of a private education system that had been previously unchallenged in society. Thanks for her analysis and disclosures, her readers felt able to reveal their personal suffering within the boarding school system, in terms of sexual violence, ‘fagging’ and other humiliations. Therapy, she said, was not something to be ashamed of, but could help them come to terms with their experience.
A Jungian analyst in private practice in Leicestershire, Schaverein discovered in her clinics that many patients with depression or an inability to sustain long term relationships, were graduates of the boarding school system, sometimes sent there by parents working abroad in the post war period. She coined an alphabet of their trauma; A represented the abandonment of being sent away from home and left with strangers; B, for the bereavement they felt, often described as homesickness; C, implied the captivity they sensed in their institutionalised condition, and D dissociation, the creation of a braver, false self which cut them off from their true feelings.
Schaverein was backed by membership of several professional institutions, including the International Association for Analytical Psychology, and held an associate professorship in Art Psychotherapy at Sheffield University. She was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, and published articles in The British Journal of Psychotherapy on transference and the treatment of anorexia. She was a visiting professor at the Northern Programme for Art Psychotherapy, and lectured prodigiously on her boarding school theme, creating a community of its survivors.
The idea first came to her via her 44 year old patient, Theo, who attended her clinic in 1990 complaining of “poisonous” black moods, which had gradually worsened. When he revealed he had been sent to boarding school at the age of eight, she urged him to draw his memories of the institution “and it just poured out of him,” revealing a child exhausted by fear and the battle for survival, which resulted in separating into two selves; the vulnerable self and the one damaged at boarding school. She worked with Theo until his death two years later, and featured him in her 2020 book, The Dying Patient in Psychotherapy: Desire Dreams and Individuation.
“Ex boarders,” she explained, “don’t behave in an appropriate manner when they’re upset. They no longer can cry. Often they come and see me and they haven’t cried since that first day at school.” Some suffered from amnesia in which their memory gaps helped them cope with their past trauma as children.
Schaverein also published papers on Holocaust issues revealed during art therapy. The Scapegoat Transference: the Holocaust and the Collective Unconscious was published in 1996. On November 17, 2006, she published Inheritance: Jewish Identity and The Legacy of the Holocaust mediated through art psychotherapy groups. In this paper, aimed at alerting practitioners to the implication of the Holocaust in the experience of Jewish clients, she wrote: “Many Jewish people who come for psychotherapy today were not necessarily, not apparently, directly affected by the Holocaust and yet they carry the inter-generational scars. Beginning with my own personal experience, as well as the insight I have gained from conducting analytical art psychotherapy groups on Jewish identity, I will show how subtle and pervasive is the legacy of the Holocaust.”
She explained that the Jewish experience on which she based her paper, had implications for work with refugees and immigrants from many other current situations. It discussed consideration of some of the psychological effects of antisemitism.
Born in Hampstead, north London, Joy Schaverein was the elder of the two daughters of Julianne née Simon, and Hyman Schaverein. Moving to Brighton, East Sussex where her father was an estate agent and RNLI lifeboat volunteer, she did not go to boarding school, herself, but to a local private school, unlike her father, Hyman, who had. She included his case study in her book. He had revealed in old age the memory that haunted him of being left at a boarding school in Brighton in 1916 at the age of six, dressed in short trousers and a velour hat. He recalled being bullied from the first day. Seventy years later he wondered: “If I was so precious that mother dressed me this way, why then did she part with me?”
Joy studied at Brighton School of Art, followed by the prestigious Slade School of Art in London, where she did a postgraduate course in fine art. She opted for art psychotherapy and began training with the NHS in Brighton and St Albans College of Art, later absorbed into Hertfordshire University, and where she later became one of the first course leaders for its MA art therapy programme. In 1968 she married the artist, Peter Wilson.
She gained her PhD in art psychotherapy from Birmingham City Polytechnic (now University) in 1990, and helped develop the links between art therapy and art psychotherapy. Her book, The Revealing Image (1991) became a game-changer in showing the powerful role of images made during art therapy sessions.
Known for the warmth and kindness she emanated during her teaching process, Schaverein also published Desire and the Female Therapist (1995) and Gender, Countertransference and the Erotic Transference (2006), In 2022 she and her husband moved back to London to be closer to family. She retired from clinical practice last December and is survived by her husband, Peter, children, Damien and Galia and grandchildren, Alice, Misty, Arlo and Coco.
Joy Schaverein: born February 2, 1943. Died May 7, 2025
