Marie Battle Singer, Ph.D. (1910-1985)

Marie Battle Singer was born in Okolona, Mississippi in the American South in 1910. She grew up in a family of African American educators just one generation removed from slavery. Marie’s maternal grandmother, an emancipated slave, was one of the most influential figures in her childhood. Marie was also devoted to her father, Wallace Battle who founded the Okolona Industrial School—modeled on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute—in 1902. The residential primary and secondary school was established to provide an education and technical training for the region’s Black children who lacked access to basic opportunities. Marie and her three siblings grew up in the small, rural town and were educated at her parent’s school. During her childhood, Marie witnessed the devastation wrought by virulent racism and violence while enjoying a life of relative privilege. The daily insults and indignities experienced by her family were compounded by episodes of sheer terror. After the Ku Klux Klan murdered a teacher on Okolona’s campus, the family fled the South as part of the Great Migration in the late 1920s. She and her two sisters were sent North for safety and to further their education. Marie arrived in New England in 1929 to attend Boston University, where she experienced profound displacement and new versions of racial discrimination and inequality. She quickly adjusted to her new life and reveled in the relative freedom of the North. By the time she completed her university degree in English literature, her family was settled in New York City where she would live for the next 15 years.
During this period, Marie began a lifelong commitment to helping others, serving as head of a youth program for an all-Black Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) chapter for four years. But finding employment was difficult for a young Black woman in the 1930s and 1940s. Marie entered into a short-lived marriage, changing her name to Marie Wills. After working in series of unsatisfying positions in public service, she decided to attend Smith College in Massachusetts to earn a master’s degree in social work with the hope of expanding her options. Despite her qualifications, Marie found herself barred from many jobs due to her race. In 1948, she joined the legions of Americans seeking adventure and opportunity abroad to work for the rehabilitation of post-war Europe. Marie found a position with the International Refugee Organization, based in Germany, and held administrative positions in child care services. For two years she played a role in treating and repatriating the thousands of displaced child refugees across Germany. Marie worked alongside physicians and psychologists who inspired her to further her training. She also realized that she enjoyed a sense of liberation in Europe that she never experienced at home.
In the summer of 1950, Marie Wills decided to move to England where she hoped to find work and to study with Anna Freud. She joined one of the first cohorts of the Hampstead Clinic’s training program. She would later write “The three happiest moments of my stay in London were: when I first went to see Miss Freud in her home; when I was accepted for her training course; and when I was appointed to the staff of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic.” From this moment, Marie committed herself to the life of an expatriate, making a home in England and only returning to the States for rare visits. The next few years were a whirlwind of accomplishment—she completed the four-year psychoanalytic training, worked part-time as a social worker, and embarked on a doctoral program at the University of London, while establishing a private practice. Some of her energies also went into creative pursuit as she began painting and exhibiting her modernist art. She also met and married the Scottish poet, writer, and marine biologist James Burns Singer in 1956. The pair cut an eccentric figure among the writers, artists, and intellectuals of post-war London. During this period Marie wrote a series of articles for The Observer on the problems of adolescence and published an essay about the Notting Hill riots, in the process establishing herself as an expert on youth culture and trauma. She successfully completed her doctorate in 1961.
Marie and her husband moved to Cambridge where she built a new clinical practice. She was elected to a Research Fellowship at Clare Hall, a position which she held until 1972. Tragically, her husband Jimmy died in 1964. Despite struggling with grief, Marie continued her work, buying a house on Little St. Mary’s Lane where she saw patients, entertained friends, and welcomed generations of students into her home. For many years she was one of only two psychoanalysts in Cambridge, and her practice became focused on university students and postgraduate adults as well as children. In the mid-1960s she conducted a series of interviews with Cambridge undergraduates to better understand their difficulties adjusting to university life. This work became a BBC program “Cambridge Fact and Fantasy” and later an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Throughout her career, Marie published articles on a variety of topics including race relations, alcoholism, broken marriages, and spiritual journeys. Her scholarly publication, “Fantasies of a Borderline Patient,” appeared in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (1960).
During Marie’s years at Clare Hall she developed friendships and associations with numerous Cambridge scholars and students. Among her many close friends and collaborators were physicist and founding fellow Richard Eden, biochemist and historian Joseph Needham, philosopher John Wisdom, and anthropologist Polly Hill. By the early 1970s, Marie taught courses on psychoanalysis in the Experimental Psychology department, the first to do so since Karin Stephen in the 1930s. She also taught training physicians at Addenbrookes Hospital and helped Oxford University students create a psychoanalysis study group. The loss of her husband also inspired her to work with budding writers and establish programs for those struggling with creative blocks. Marie was an enthusiastic fixture at the Cambridge Poetry Festival where she hoped to pass on Jimmy’s legacy. Helping patients was always her passion, as she enabled several generations of young people to lead fruitful and productive lives. Marie Singer succumbed to illness in the early 1980s and she lived her remaining years on St. Eligius Street before passing away in 1985. A commemorative plaque for Marie Battle Singer and James Burns Singer is on the grounds of Little St. Mary’s Church across from the Cambridge home she loved.
Clare Hall, friends of Marie Battle Singer, and her niece have set up a Fund at the College in her memory. Should you wish to support the Marie Battle Singer Fund with a gift, please click on the following link: https://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/online-donation-form/
The Marie Battle Singer Fund will generate bursaries for postgraduate students, with a preference for transatlantic or international students, working within the fields of psychology or race relations, or any other closely related subjects at Clare Hall. These bursaries will support them with the costs of their academic-related activities. In the event that an award cannot be made to either transatlantic or international students, awards may be made to UK-domiciled students who are working within the relevant fields.
Grants from the Fund may support students with any of the following:
- Participation in and travelling to conferences
- Any research-related expenses
- Books and other study material or equipment
- Dissertation-binding costs