D W Winnicott

Michael Jacobs

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781446225967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

`The importance of Michael Jacobs? book lies in his attempt to convey... Winnicott?s profound influence.... Jacobs rightly delights in the creativity and imagination of his subject and illustrates these with numerous quotations and descriptions from Winnicott?s writings.... What is conveyed throughout the book is the essence of Winnicott.... [whose] gift was to make psychoanalytic language, methods and concepts more widely available, accepted and appreciated to a nonpsychoanalytic world? - British Psychological Society Counselling Psychology Review

One of the best-known British psychoanalysts, D W Winnicott attracts the interest of counsellors and psychotherapists far beyond the strict psychoanalytic tradition in which he was trained. He coined many phrases that have entered the discourse of therapy, such as `good enough mother?, `transitional object? and `facilitating environment?. Winnicott has had a profound impact on research into the mother-baby relationship, and his unorthodox manner and sparkling writing style have attracted enthusiastic acclaim.

In this book, Michael Jacobs summarizes Winnicott?s life and explains his major theoretical concepts. He also rigorously evaluates his practice as a clinician - for example, the holding and management of deeply regressed patients. While highlighting Winnicott?s brilliance and creativity, Jacobs is not afraid to scrutinize his contributions more critically. He also discusses criticisms others have made of Winnicott, notably within the psychoanalytic movement. The final chapter assesses the influence of Winnicott?s thinking in other countries as well as in Britain.

1

The Life of D. W. Winnicott

There are in public life and letters certain figures who catch the imagination and evoke admiration, sometimes only on the basis of a small number of known facts about them, and a few well-chosen phrases uttered by them. Most of us in fact know little about such figures, although we imagine we know them well, because their names are frequently dropped into conversations. We quote them, as evidence of basic truths we hold important, although in truth we probably only have a few phrases of theirs in our minds, what modern jargon might call ‘sound-bites’. We have probably never read their books.

In the allied fields of counselling and psychotherapy one such figure is D. W. Winnicott. Although those who were close to him call him Donald, ‘D. W.’ or ‘D. W. W.’ for the rest of us he is ‘Winnicott’ – just as in the completely different medium of television, one that he himself appeared to have enjoyed, we think of ‘Morse’ or ‘Lovejoy’. They have no first names, and we probably do not even think of his first names – Donald Woods. Although those close to him appear to revere his memory with enormous love and with a fund of stories about him that at times make him appear a saint, to most of us his life is sketchy, even if we quote him and speak about his work with a similar degree of praise. Some of the terms he coined trip off our tongues in discussions, in lectures and in supervision – notably ‘the good-enough mother’, ‘the transitional object’, ‘true and false self’, ‘the facilitating environment’ and perhaps ‘there is no such thing as a baby’. We have in fact for the most part, especially if we come from outside psychoanalytic circles, slender acquaintance with his written work, except perhaps the best-selling The Child, the Family and the Outside World (1964), or one or two of his occasional papers, such as ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’ (1975).

This is of course not an unusual phenomenon in the world of counselling and therapy. Each school has its idols: Freud, Klein and Rogers became such and largely remain such, on a scale which probably exceeds Winnicott. They are similarly introduced to the reader in their own volumes in this series. All of these figures – and more – have been focuses for a minor industry of training and writing. There are signs that Winnicott too has become another of those whose ideas and techniques are about to spawn another shelf of books, although far less obviously a school of training and practice. The Winnicott Trust has encouraged the publication of all his papers left at the time of his death, a collection which is all but complete. They have however resisted so far the idea of a ‘Collected Works’, uncertain if that is what Winnicott would have wished. Alongside the increasing volume of literature on the history and thinking of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts, attention is constantly turned to Winnicott’s work. This present volume is one of many that are being written about his ideas and his practice, although unlike this one, many of them address those already familiar with current psychoanalytic thinking.

As yet there has been no definitive biography. Winnicott’s American disciple Robert Rodman was turned down by the then members of the Winnicott Trust when he sought permission some years ago for access to the papers for such a work. For the most part, references to Winnicott’s life appear disappointingly repetitious in the various books that refer to his own development. They turn out in the end to be based for the most part on the reminiscences of his second wife, Clare Winnicott. These appear in her ‘D. W. W.: A Reflection’ in one of the earliest volumes of papers assessing Winnicott’s ideas (Grolnick et al., 1978); and in an interview recorded in 1983 and reprinted in Rudnytsky (1991). She refers also, as do most ‘lives’, to the few pages of an autobiography that Winnicott had started to write shortly before his death. There are, of course, also personal references in his papers, where Winnicott is refreshingly open about himself and his own responses to situations. There is little attempt to present a faceless ‘objective’ picture, especially since he writes so often from and of his clinical practice. Some of his extensive correspondence has been published (Rodman, 1987), and this helps to build up a more comprehensive picture of a man who wrote generously to those who communicated with him (although quite critically at times to those to whom he wished to communicate his passionate views). There are a few tantalizingly brief references to his life in some of the writing of his close colleague Masud Khan (such as the preface, curiously inaccurate in places, to Clancier and Kalmanovitch, 1987) and disguised allusions to him (as the mysterious Mr X) in Marion Milner’s extensive case study In the Hands of the Living God (1969). Adam Phillips’s useful summary of Winnicott’s life and ideas (1988) is rather fuller, although it still largely draws on the same relatively narrow sources.

An introduction to Winnicott’s ideas and practice has therefore considerable material to draw upon in his papers and books, now virtually all published. But without the help of a full biography the man himself remains (to those who did not know him personally and well) less than complete. It seems as if the reader and this author must await a more searching examination of Winnicott’s life, although I share here as much as in the context of an introductory work I can usefully glean. What I have found myself asking is why Winnicott and his particular expression of psychoanalytic thought exerts such a fascination for many counsellors and therapists, including those who would not necessarily wish to associate themselves with the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis? The answer to that searching question must lie partly in the sort of person he was, although, as I shortly show, any full-scale biographer needs to get behind the near-ideal picture painted of him.

Early Life

That Winnicott should be such a ‘favourite’ thinker for counsellors and therapists makes immediate sense when we learn that he was also a highly favoured child. Other authors also attach significance to the location of his upbringing. Donald Woods Winnicott was born on 7 April 1896, in Plymouth, which they remind us was the final setting-out place of the Pilgrim Fathers on their journey to America. Plymouth may therefore symbolize a tradition of dissent (Phillips, 1988: 23), although Winnicott’s own dissenting nature may also come partly from being brought up in a favoured position – it can lead to a confidence which makes less likely the need to conform to gain acceptance. Certainly Winnicott’s later refusal to be tied to one way of thinking makes him, for a variety of reasons, an attractive figure to counsellors and therapists who similarly favour autonomy or self-actualization, or whatever term they employ in their basic philosophy.

He was the youngest of three children, and the only son. His father is described variously as a corsetry merchant, according to Phillips (1988), or as a wholesaler in hardware who supplied the Navy, by Clare Winnicott (Rudnytsky, 1991: 184). In due course his father became Lord Mayor of Plymouth, a magistrate, and was subsequently knighted. Sir Frederick is described as having ‘an old fashioned quiet dignity and poise about him, and a deep sense of fun. Those who knew him speak of him as a person of high intelligence and sound judgement’ despite, as Winnicott described him, his having had learning difficulties (Grolnick et al., 1978: 21, 23). Although he was (as I describe later) clearly remembered by Winnicott with great affection as being present after church on Sundays, his father was not so obviously present at other times. Winnicott, looking back, felt that he did not see enough of his father, saying, ‘I was left too much to all my mothers. Thank goodness I was sent away at thirteen!’ (Rudnytsky, 1991: 185). Perhaps his father’s absence through work and in civic duties – not of course untypical of the time or indeed of fathers’ relative absence generally – creeps into Winnicott’s writing about men and into his theoretical position on the significance of father. This I outline in Chapter 2 and examine more critically in Chapter 4.

The reference above to ‘all my mothers’ probably stems from the young Donald being brought up in a household of women: his mother, two sisters six and seven years older than him, a nanny, sometimes a governess and an aunt who lived with the family for much of the time. Across the road was another Winnicott household – his uncle’s – with three boys among the five cousins there. He was devoted to his nanny, and Clare Winnicott remembered them seeking her out in London in 1950, to ‘ensure she was all right and living comfortably’ (Grolnick et al., 1978: 21). Letters home to his mother later in adolescence also reveal similar affection.

Winnicott’s upbringing was in a Methodist home. Both his parents were leading members of the local Methodist church, his father being both treasurer and in the choir. This non-conformist background is important, particularly for the type of non-conformity it represented, which was of an independent spirit, and yet not narrow-minded and repressive in the way some non-conformist religion can be. It was his father who was the life-long Methodist. Winnicott’s mother had been an Anglican before her marriage, as he himself was to become while he was at medical school. (Winnicott’s first wife was also an Anglican and Clare Winnicott remembers that as the occasion for Winnicott being confirmed, at the age of 26 or 27, although she says that he did not go to church for very long.)

The Methodist church was a few minutes walk away. Clare Winnicott tells the story of how Donald used to walk home from church with his father: this was experienced as a privilege for the youngest in the family. Donald started his father talking about religion, asking him a question about it. His father apparently replied, ‘Listen, my boy. You read the Bible – what you find there. And you decide for yourself what you want, you know. It’s free. You don’t have to believe what I think. Make up your own mind about it. Just read the Bible’ (Rudnytsky, 1991: 180–1). Later Winnicott was to describe how ‘I am always glad that my religious upbringing was of a kind that allowed for growing up out of’ (Winnicott, 1986: 143, my italics). This over-prepositioned phrase (but again one of those memorable snatches of Winnicott’s prose) in fact triples the direction of the growth, and aptly describes Winnicott’s attitude to the need to outgrow dogma in psychoanalysis as much as in religion. Although later Winnicott no longer described himself as a Christian, the idea of belief remained vital to him. Clare Winnicott recalled him saying, ‘The point is, can they believe? I don’t care what it’s about. The capacity to believe is more important than what you believe’ (Rudnytsky, 1991: 181).

As the youngest child and only boy, Donald received much attention from ‘a lot of people who thought he was wonderful’ (Rudnytsky, 1991: 180). It seems to have been also a good home to ‘grow up out of’. Everyone had a great sense of humour. ‘There weren’t disasters in the Winnicott home . . . just funny episodes’ (Rudnytsky, 1991: 181). Donald had no doubts he was loved, and this engendered a deep sense of security. As Clare Winnicott puts it: ‘from this basic position Donald was then free to explore all the available spaces in the house and garden around him and to fill the spaces with bits of himself and so gradually make his world his own. This capacity to be at home served him well throughout his life’ (Grolnick et al., 1978: 21). Later in life she recalled how when travelling abroad he would often be found in the kitchen of an inn. As a child, his mother apparently complained, he spent more time with the cook in the kitchen than in the rest of the house.

There is a sense of near-idealization in Clare Winnicott’s descriptions of the different aspects of Winnicott’s childhood, set in a family home which appears to have all the appearance of normality enriched with warm feelings and good relationships. One wonders how much his devoted widow paints a portrait which if mostly true is nonetheless selective and seductive, and whether she reads back into his early life all the positive feelings she was herself left with. One of my sources who knew both Donald and Clare Winnicott commented (in a personal communication) that she ‘kept up an ideal picture of Donald and didn’t give the low-down’, although another source cites what may or may not be an apocryphal comment of Clare Winnicott’s that Winnicott had ‘delusions of benignity’. Even then his naughtiness (and it is no more than that) is told in a way which seems intended to charm. Is it the cynicism bred by psychoanalytic thinking that makes the reader ask where the more negative side is? Clare Winnicott was herself aware of this:

Some who read this abbreviated account of D. W. W.’s early life and family relationships may be inclined to think it sounds too good to be true. But the truth is that it was good, and try as I will I cannot present it in any other light. Essentially he was a deeply happy person whose capacity for enjoyment never failed to triumph over the setbacks and disappointments that came his way. Moreover there is a sense in which the quality of his early life and his appreciation of it did present him with a major problem, that of freeing himself from the family and establishing his own separate life and identity without sacrificing the early richness. It took him a long time to do this. (Grolnick et al., 1978: 25)

We might therefore sympathize with the nine-year-old Donald, who we are told looked in the mirror and said ‘I’m too nice’, and from that point determined to show another side of himself. He started becoming bottom of the class; and he pulled the wings off flies, although such behaviour is far from the deviancy and delinquency that he was later to work with and write about. ‘He wanted to find this other dimension in himself’ (Rudnytsky, 1991: 186); feeling too good and too much liked by everybody, he had to find the nastiness in himself. Clare tells also of an episode when Donald was three, when he smashed his sister’s doll’s face with a mallet, a doll that his father used to tease him with. Winnicott himself wrote of this incident that ‘much of my life has been founded on the undoubted fact that I actually did this deed, not merely wished it and planned it’ (Grolnick et al., 1978: 23). He was also relieved when his father melted the doll’s waxen nose and repaired it so that it became a face again. It was an early demonstration of the power of the reparative act, that in itself helped him to accept that he had actually become violent both with the doll and, indirectly, with his father. Reparation is another of the themes Winnicott was to stress in his work. But repairing alone might miss another significant aspect of this wilfulness:

Toleration of one’s destructive impulses results in a new thing: the capacity to enjoy ideas, even with destruction in them, and the bodily excitements that belong to them, or that they belong to. This development gives elbow-room for the experience of concern, which is the basis for everything constructive. (Winnicott, 1986: 87)

It was another moment of wilfulness that seemed to the young Winnicott to be the reason (although clearly in retrospect not the real reason) for him being sent away to boarding school. He was at that time at a preparatory school in Plymouth, and he recalls that one day he came home to midday dinner and said ‘drat’. ‘My father looked pained as only he could look, blamed my mother for not seeing to it that I had decent friends, and from that moment he prepared himself to send me away’ (Grolnick et al., 1978: 23). So at thirteen, the usual age for public schoolboys, Donald Winnicott went to the Leys School in Cambridge – a non-conformist foundation. He may have missed home, but he quickly entered with enthusiasm into this new experience, and he appears to have ‘loved’ public school life. ‘He had immense vitality and capacity to enter into things and enjoy himself. I’ve never known anyone who could enjoy himself more’, said his widow Clare, again in glowing terms (Rudnytsky, 1991: 181). He wrote many letters home, all of which show his ‘liveliness and interest’ (Rudnytsky, 1991: 185), sending his love to everyone including the cat and the maids. The family had given him the security to become free enough to explore and to embrace new experiences. The idea of ‘playing’ started early, and not surprisingly therefore assumes great significance in Winnicott’s writing and in his actual practice. He ran, cycled, swam, played rugger, joined the Scouts and sang in the choir.

Discovering Darwin and Freud

It was when he was at this school, as he described in a talk given in 1945 to sixth-formers (1957: 128–9), that Winnicott discovered Darwin’s Origin of Species. He found the books in second-hand shops in Cambridge, and in time collected all Darwin’s work. In a letter to his mother he says that he would like money for his birthday ‘to buy some of those wonderful books I pass every day’ (Rudnytsky, 1991: 182). Of the Origin of Species in particular he said, ‘I could not leave off reading it.’ Looking back he thought that ‘the main thing was that it showed that living things could be examined scientifically with the corollary that gaps in knowledge and understanding need not scare me’ (1957: 129). In this there are two further pointers to his later work. Firstly, the importance of the environment and of adaptation to it. But unlike Larmarckian theory that sees species as capable of adapting themselves to changes in the environment, Darwin’s theory of natural selection means that it is not easy to survive in a hostile environment. If it is only by chance that mutants of a species may find themselves more suited for the changing environment, it is also true that the stability of the environment is essential for normal survival and growth. Babies cannot adapt: they need a facilitating environment. This was to provide a counter to the over-concentration upon internal experience that tended to dominate British psychoanalytic thought once Melanie Klein’s theories held sway during the 1930s. At the same time Darwin’s theory gave Winnicott a deep belief in the developmental process and in the drive towards health, including mental health.

The second pointer to Winnicott’s later work to be found in his early interest in Darwin is finding that ‘gaps in knowledge and understanding need not scare me’ (1957: 129). The importance for him and his work of the gaps, or, in his more considered language, the spaces in between, becomes clearer in later chapters. So too does his willingness to accept not understanding. In a comment on one of the early consultations with ‘the Piggle’ (see Chapter 3) Winnicott wrote: ‘Importance of my not understanding what she has not yet been able to give me clues for. Only she knew the answers, and when she could encompass the meaning of the fears she would make it possible for me to understand too’ (1980: 48). Clare Winnicott felt that Darwin changed Winnicott’s attitude to religion and indeed changed his whole life. The scientific way of working excited him, and made him feel that this was what he wanted to pursue. He remained of the view that psychoanalysis was a science, writing in 1946 to Ella Freeman Sharpe: ‘I enjoy true psycho-analytic work more than the other kinds, and the reason is to some extent bound up with the fact that in psycho-analysis the art is less and the technique is based on scientific considerations more’ (Rodman, 1987: 10). Yet his considerable and innovative contribution to the discipline seems rather less scientifically rigorous than others who have also claimed the same status for psychoanalysis. His use of observation may have been greater than that of many in the field, but some of his hypotheses (perhaps inevitably, given the difficulty of describing infant experience) involve leaps of faith. He was fully aware that there were objections to calling psychology a science because of the highly subjective element in observations, especially through the influence of the repressed unconscious. Nevertheless psychoanalysis is still ‘an instrument of scientific research’ (1957: 133). Chapter 5 considers some of the more scientifically rigorous psychological research that has been applied to some of Winnicott’s hypotheses.

It is interesting to find a reference to unconscious communication, perhaps before he had even heard of Freud, in a letter written to a school friend, when Winnicott was only sixteen: ‘Father and I have been trying consciously and perhaps unconsciously to find out what the ambition of the other is in regard to my future’ (Grolnick et al., 1978: 25). His growing interest in science meant turning down the idea that he should go into his father’s business, which he knew his father expected him to do – eventually to take it over from him. He was keen to please his father, but a friend persuaded him (as indeed his father might also have done) that he had to do what he wanted. The same letter refers to Winnicott’s own wish: ‘I have for ever so long wanted to be a doctor.’ One of the factors in this may have been his breaking a collar bone on the sports field at school (Khan refers instead to a damaged hip, but this appears to be one of a number of confusions in Khan’s memory: he also refers to Winnicott’s father as ‘George’ rather than ‘Frederick’ (Clancier and Kalmanovitch, 1987: xvi)). Clare Winnicott recalled how he had often said with reference to that time: ‘I could see that for the rest of my life I would have to depend on doctors if I damaged myself or became ill, an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Life of D. W. Winnicott
• 2 Major Contributions to Theory
• 3 Major Contributions to Practice
• 4 Criticisms and Rebuttals
• 5 The Overall Influence of D. W. Winnicott
• Select Bibliography of Winnicott’s Works
• References
• Index