The New Republic

Winnicott: Life and Work

By F. Robert Rodman

(Perseus, 459 pp., $30)

Click here to purchase the book.

I.Unlike Freud, Donald Winnicott is not a cultural icon, read in Great
Books courses, revered and reviled. Unlike Jacques Lacan, he is not
an intellectual cult figure, with a band of zealous disciples and
an impenetrable jargon. There is no school of Winnicott; there are
no courses in his methods. All this is as he wished it. Nobody was
more skeptical of cults and the rigidities that they induced. All
his life Winnicott was obsessed with the freedom of the individual
self to exist defiantly, resisting parental and cultural demands, to
be there without saying a word if silence was its choice. In his
own writings he spoke with a voice that was determinedly his own,
surprisingly personal, idiosyncratic, playful, and at the same time
ordinary. One could not extract a jargon from it if one tried, and
one cannot talk about his theoretical ideas without confronting
live, complex human beings. That, perhaps, is why he has never had
a secure home in the academy, which is so enamored of beautiful
scientific or pseudo-scientific structures, and so often fearful of
real people and the demands that their complexity imposes. And for
these same reasons Winnicott has had an enormous influence on the
practice of psychoanalysis, particularly in America.

When Winnicott burst onto the London psychoanalytic scene, an odd
rumpled man exploding with ideas--he was like a Catherine wheel
shooting off sparks, a colleague remarked--analysts still saw human
emotions mainly in terms of Freud's account of primitive
instinctual drives, with sexual gratification as their goal.
Melanie Klein was already making her important contribution to
Freudian theory by insisting on the crucial importance of the
earliest stages of life; but she clung to Freud's hedonic theory,
seeing the infant's search as aimed at pleasure, which she,
apparently along with Freud, understood to be a single
undifferentiated experience. (Winnicott's great contemporary, the
Scottish analyst W.R.D. Fairbairn, once wrote that Klein could have
avoided this error by reading John Stuart Mill.) And she insisted
that the infant's psychic drama was played out inside its own
subjective space, with figures that were the demonic projections of
its own inchoate sense of parts of reality. The actual environment
and its people were of no interest to her.

Winnicott learned much from Klein, with whom he had a close if
uneven friendship. He absorbed from her the importance of the young
child's fantasy life, to which, as a practitioner, he had
remarkable empathetic access. (The analysis of a little girl
published under the title of The Piggle is one of the great
examples in English literature of an adult entering the wild
conflict- ridden world of a young child.) But he insisted that the
infant seeks from the start complex forms of relationship and
reciprocity, not simply its own pleasure. And also that the
infant's development cannot be understood without looking at its
real surroundings-- at the objects, responsive or nonresponsive,
that either create a "facilitating environment" for emotional growth
or cause the self to hide, its place taken by a rigid mechanical
surrogate. Thus, Winnicott famously said, "there is no such thing
as a baby" on its own: we are always dealing with a "nursing
couple." If psychoanalysis in America has largely become a theory
of emotional nurture and exchange rather than one of hedonic
satisfaction, it is thanks to Winnicott.

Winnicott also situated psychoanalysis far more accurately than had
many of its other practitioners, seeing it as an imaginative
humanistic endeavor, akin both to poetry and to love, rather than
as an exact science with unvarying rules. To fellow analyst Harry
Guntrip, who was his patient, he remarked that "we differ from
Freud who was for curing symptoms. We're concerned with living
persons, whole living and loving." (This somewhat unfair treatment
of Freud shows the aggressive side of the gentle analyst's
personality.) As for the goal of the process, it was not simply the
removal of symptoms; it was also the ability to play, to be
creative. "We are poor indeed," he said, "if we are only sane."

As F. Robert Rodman's fine biography makes plain, these insights
grew out of a very troubled early life, followed by a successful
and reasonably happy adulthood, though marred by cardiac illness,
conflict with other members of the psychoanalytic community, and a
series of questionable ethical judgments. Rodman, a practicing
analyst, has edited Winnicott's correspondence, and this biography
began as a quasi-official work co-authored with a member of the
Winnicott Trust. He had the cooperation of Winnicott's widow, Clare
Britton, who died in 1984, as well as numerous friends and
associates. On his co- author's death in 1991, Rodman assumed the
task on his own. This seems fortunate, for Rodman, though deeply
sympathetic to both the man and his ideas, is free to express
strong criticisms of Winnicott's ethical lapses, seeing him as "a
person in conflict who expressed his genius, and also went awry, in
manifold ways." With this combination of empathy and freedom, Rodman
presents as balanced and insightful a portrait of the genesis of
Winnicott's ideas as we are likely to have.

II.

Donald Winnicott was born in 1896, in the west of England, to a
prosperous middle-class Methodist family. According to a memoir
written by his widow, his childhood was on the whole happy, but
Rodman now makes it clear that matters were more complicated.
Winnicott's father, a rigid man who never appears in photos without
perfectly waxed moustaches, evidently imposed strict standards of
behavior. The young Donald loved to play with a beautiful female wax
doll, and his father so teased him about this non-male behavior
that the little boy smashed his beloved toy. Shortly thereafter
(Winnicott's widow reports in a fragmentary memoir) Donald decided,
looking at himself in the mirror, that he was "too nice," and
started to behave aggressively. One day his father heard him say
"Drat!" and immediately sent him off to boarding school. If much of
his life and thought was devoted to nonconformity and protection of
the "true self" from invasion by the forces of conformity
(including gender conformity, a topic that fascinated him), this is
surely the outgrowth of his father's intrusiveness and the pain
that it inflicted. In a late essay on the self, which he describes
as "a protest from the core of me," Winnicott remarks that "rape,
and being eaten by cannibals, these are mere bagatelles as compared
with the violation of the self's core.... For me this would be the
sin against the self."

In contrast with his father, Winnicott's mother is a shadowy figure.
People who recall the family say little about her. But Rodman
pieces the fragments together convincingly, arguing that Bessie was
depressed and frightened of her sexuality. Winnicott once told a
close friend that his mother weaned him early because she disliked
the pleasurable feelings of nursing. Late in life, in a poem called
"The Tree" (partly about Christ's suffering), he described the pain
of having to keep his mother alive:

Thus I knew her

Once, stretched out on her lap

as now on a dead tree

I learned to make her smile

to stem her tears

to undo her guilt

to cure her inward death

To enliven her was my living

Here was another invasion of the self, which clearly involved
forbidding himself both aggressive and sexual feelings. Not
surprisingly, as far as we know, no member of Winnicott's family
had a healthy sexual life. His two sisters, very attractive women,
never married. Donald chose as his first wife a mentally disturbed
woman, Alice Taylor, who rarely bathed and who used to commune with
the spirit of T.E. Lawrence through her parrot. The marriage lasted
for twenty-six years but was never consummated. Sexual impotence was
a major theme in Winnicott's early life; he later connected the
ability to enjoy sex fully with the idea of giving oneself
permission to be aggressive. Several close associates link the
strain of caring for his increasingly dotty wife with a series of
heart attacks that made his health increasingly fragile.

After service on a destroyer during World War I (he spent much of
his time reading Henry James), Winnicott took a medical degree at
Cambridge and went into pediatrics. His interest in children had
been strong for years. In a letter home from Cambridge he describes
his delight in arranging theatrical games for the local Boy Scouts:
it was "such a revelation of the powers of the imagination of the
boys that I shall never forget that day.... Each one was absolutely
different from the others, and half the charm lay there." Winnicott
once estimated that during his career he had treated sixty thousand
children. His rich experience gave psychoanalysis a new--and
characteristically British-- empirical dimension.

At the same time, no doubt owing to his own personal problems, his
interest in psychoanalysis was already strong. While seeing
pediatric patients, he went into training analysis with James
Strachey (who wrote inappropriately gossipy letters speculating on
whether "Mr. W" would "fuck his wife all of a sudden"). He
graduated from the British Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1935 and
began analysis with the Kleinian Joan Riviere. Here begins
Winnicott's lifelong involvement with Klein's ideas, and with Klein
herself. Chosen by Klein in 1935 to analyze her son Eric, Winnicott
was drawn deeply into the Kleinian circle, where he never felt
completely at home. Rodman depicts well the conflict between the
Kleinians, so intent on theoretical purity and so insistent on
orthodoxy, and Winnicott, who had a deep need to rebel and to go his
own way.

Winnicott's friendship with Klein continued strong until her death,
but increasingly, in letters to her, he urges her to watch out for
her school, and to realize that theoretical closure and analytical
perfection are inappropriate goals. Meanwhile, in a series of
papers that won increasing attention, he was challenging the
foundations of her theoretical approach, insisting on the
importance of the real-life mother's actual behavior and of living
human interaction. After Klein's death, and to some extent before
it, her school treated Winnicott coldly. (Here Rodman may be too
quick to impute blame to the Kleinians. They were a doctrinaire
lot, but he needed to feel that he was in rebellion against
conformity-demanding enemies. It seems unclear how much of the
persecution that he felt was in fact genuine.)

Working with evacuated children during World War II, he met the
social worker Clare Britton. In 1944 the two began an affair that
led, in 1949, to the dissolution of his marriage to Alice (he
waited until his father died before taking this step) and to a long
and extremely happy marriage that lasted until his death in 1971.
Plainly they did have a successful sexual relationship, and they
shared a love of humor, music, and poetry. Clare was utterly
different from Alice: "beefsteak," as one friend said, rather than
"elderflour fritters." The couple indulged in elaborate jokes and
wrote silly poems to each other during boring moments in
conferences (including a lovely scatological putdown of the racist
politician Enoch Powell). Another friend called them "two crazy
people who delighted each other and delighted their friends." Asked
whether they ever quarreled, the elderly Clare recalled that "in
fact the question of hurting each other did not arise because we
were operating in the play area where everything is permitted."
Sometimes Winnicott would wake up in the night and say: "I'm potty
about you, do you know that?"

Clare, a tough woman and a very successful worker with needy
children (she eventually received the Order of the British Empire),
seems also to have had a remarkable capacity for unanxiously
"holding" Donald's mercurial temper, his vicissitudes, his health
difficulties. After he had experienced an especially serious
cardio-pulmonary illness, she found him up in a tree outside their
home, sawing off a limb. Her first impulse was to get him down, to
make him rest. But then: "I thought, 'No, it's his life and he's
got to live it. If he dies after this, he dies.' But that was him.
He wanted to live." At the opening of an autobiography that he was
just beginning at the time of his death, he writes, "Prayer: Oh,
God, may I be alive when I die." "And he was, really," Clare
concludes.

As Winnicott's success increased, so did his confidence in his own
judgment. The dark side of Rodman's story is that this confidence
led to increasingly serious errors of judgment. We may already
detect moral lapses in his collusion with Klein to conceal from her
son the fact that his mother and his analyst were corresponding.
Many such lapses follow. He analyzed Marion Milner, a close friend
who was probably in love with him. He analyzed a patient who was at
the time a tenant in the Winnicott house. He encouraged Clare to
take up analysis with Klein while he was himself in close contact
with her. He socialized with patients. In general he seems to have
had little awareness of appropriate boundaries.; Most serious,
however, was Winnicott's long analysis of and friendship with Masud
Khan.

Most serious, however, was Winnicott's long analysis of and
friendship with Masud Khan. A wealthy Pakistani migr and
self-styled prince, Khan has gradually been revealed as one of the
most unprincipled and destructive analysts who ever practiced. He
had affairs with some patients, and socialized with others in a
show-offy way; he subjected patients to insult and humiliation; he
used the therapeutic setting as a frame for his pathological
self-aggrandizement, his obsessive tales of how he got the better
of people. All this time he was in analysis with Winnicott, and
Winnicott steadily supported him, first advancing his candidacy in
the Institute, then supporting his continuation there. Rodman deals
with this scandal tactfully and rather briefly, but he makes no
secret of the serious issues that it raises about Winnicott's
ethical judgment. Khan was the son that Winnicott never had;
clearly he was very devoted, although Clare managed to keep him at
a distance and prevented him from becoming the editor of
Winnicott's papers.

Although Winnicott did not want or need a "school," he did need
someone to support his ideas and to share their genesis. But he
made an egregiously bad choice, and he stuck with it in the
presence of the mounting evidence of Khan's disgraceful conduct.
Noting the evident high degree of "ongoing excitement and mutual
self-indulgence" in the relationship, Rodman suggests that there was
a sexual component, although it seems unlikely that this element
was acknowledged. Khan's patient Wynne Godley, whose account of his
analysis is a key document in the unmasking of Khan, reports that
Khan took phone calls from Winnicott during his sessions; once they
spent his time joking about fellatio.

On a trip to New York in 1969, Winnicott suffered a particularly
serious cardiac crisis after a bout of the flu. Identifying himself
with Cathy in Wuthering Heights, he wrote that he longed to come
home before dying. He lived for another year, but in a weakened
condition. During this period, amazingly, Winnicott continued to
see patients; he wrote and delivered new papers, broaching
significant new themes, such as the importance of recognizing the
social rigidity of gender norms and the mixture of genders in all
human beings.

Most impressively, he continued to correspond generously with
strangers. Rodman himself, a young analyst just out of the army,
received a four-page commentary on his first article. A troubled
man from Oklahoma, writing to Winnicott out of the blue, got a
helpful three-page letter about the roots of aggression. The
analyst Alan Stone, who met him at this time (and found Winnicott
unable to walk without stopping), reported that

he held me in the center of his attention (or so it seemed to me) in
a way that I have never experienced with any other human being. It
was not that he made constant eye contact, or that he interjected
the traditional psychoanalytic hum of empathy, or that he was
selflessly accepting. As we walked he spoke of his own ideas, he
reacted and responded with dignity and originality, yet all the
time I felt recognized and encouraged--I was in a "facilitating
environment."

Not all of Winnicott's correspondence was good-natured. To an
analyst enamored of simplistic biological explanations of human
phenomena, he wrote: "There seems to be no playing in what you
write, and therefore a lack of creativity. Perhaps you reserve your
creativity for some other area of your life, in friendships for
instance, or in painting, I don't know."

He died in January 1971, after watching an old movie comedy on
television.

III.

Winnicott's main ideas emerged gradually over time, in a series of
papers rich in clinical content. He never wrote a tidy summary of
them, and it belies the nature of his thought to attempt such a
summary. Still, one can at least sketch the narrative of infancy
and childhood as he saw it, being careful to remember that, for
Winnicott, particularity is everything and that, as Rodman
emphasizes, he is the heir as much of Wordsworth and Emily Bront as
of Freud and Klein.

While Freud saw human beings as driven by powerful instincts that
need to be tamed if morality and culture are to be possible,
Winnicott had confidence in the unfolding of the developmental
process, which would produce moral awareness as an outgrowth of
early struggles if things went well enough. He believed (against
his own experience, perhaps) that development usually goes well,
and that mothers are usually "good enough." Mothers are preoccupied
with their infants early on, and attend to their needs well,
enabling the self to develop gradually and eventually to express
itself.

At first the infant cannot grasp the mother as a definite object,
and thus cannot have full-fledged emotions. Its world is symbiotic
and basically narcissistic. Gradually, however, the infant develops
the capacity to be alone-- aided by its "transitional objects," a
famous phrase invented by Winnicott for the blankets and stuffed
animals that enable children to comfort themselves when the mother
is absent. (He loved Charles Schulz and wondered whether Linus's
blanket reflected the influence of his ideas.) Eventually the child
usually develops the ability to "play alone in the presence of its
mother," a key sign of growing confidence in the developing self.
At this point, the child begins to be able to relate to the mother
as a whole person rather than as an extension of its own needs.
(Winnicott always spoke of mothers, and Rodman makes one of his
strongest criticisms at this point: he seems to have had a blind
spot for the role of the father until close to the end of his life.
At the same time, he did increasingly stress that "mother" is a
role rather than a biological category, that real mothers have
aspects of both genders, and that analysts typically play a
quasi-maternal role.)

Like Klein, Winnicott thought that this stage typically led to a
painful emotional crisis. For the child now understands that the
very same person whom it loves and embraces is the person against
whom it has directed aggressive and angry wishes (when needs are
not met automatically). But instead of Klein's somewhat forbidding
concept of "the depressive position," Winnicott articulates this
insight in terms of the concept of the developing "capacity for
concern," showing how genuinely moral feeling bootstraps itself
into existence out of the child's very love of its mother and the
awareness that its aggression has projected harm. He thus was able
to see morality as operating in tandem with love, rather than as a
forbidding set of quasi-paternal demands. He stressed the crucial
role of the imagination in coming to grips with this crisis: the
child develops the capacity to imagine its mother's feelings, and
thus becomes capable of generous and reparative acts.

Throughout this development, it is crucial that the mother should
provide the child with a "facilitating environment" that allows it
to express itself, even its destructiveness and hate, without
getting the message that the mother will thereby be destroyed.
Remarkably, mothers usually accept their children's hate and are
not destroyed. (This ability was also an essential part of the good
analyst's equipment, as he saw it. After Harry Guntrip talked at
him aggressively for half an hour in a session, Winnicott said,
"You see, you talked very hard at me, and I am not destroyed.")
Most of the time this process goes reasonably well. It will go awry
if the mother is too fearful or depressed (like Winnicott's
mother), or if she too rigidly demands conformity and perfection in
herself and in her child (like Winnicott's father).

One marvelous document concerning the latter sort of failure is
Winnicott's analysis of a young male medical student, known as B,
published in the volume Holding and Interpretation. (Rodman
dislikes this case, but I have always found it especially rich.)
Married to a man whom she saw as demanding perfection in
everything, B's mother wanted to be a perfect mother and, hence, to
have a perfect baby. This meant that she did not want her baby to
be a real baby, needy, messy, crying. B got the message that his
own needs were inappropriate and that the only way to achieve
anything was to be quiet and "good." Nor could he, like most young
children, gradually develop the capacity to release his mother from
her need to be perfect by attending to her as an imperfect human
being. This suppression of himself led to rigidity and emotional
paralysis in later life. A competent intellectual "False Self" had
developed capacities to cope with the world, but the needy
childlike "True Self" had gone underground and remained at an
infantile level, rather than gradually developing capacities to
relate emotionally and to express itself in the world. B could have
sex, but only with a woman whom he saw as an undifferentiated
object, predictable as a masturbatory fantasy; he could not
remember people's individuating features. "I feel that you are
introducing a big problem," B says to Winnicott. "I never became
human. I have missed it."

In the analysis itself, the patient repeatedly expects perfection
from Winnicott, and is terrified by the space created by the
analyst's own evident human imperfection. "The alarming thing about
equality," he remarkably observes, "is that we are then both
children and the question is, where is father? We know where we are
if one of us is the father." Winnicott points out that in a good
personal relationship there is an element of "subtle interplay" that
pre- supposes an acceptance of human imperfection. Love means many
things, "but it has to include this experience of subtle interplay,
and we could say that you are experiencing love and loving in this
situation." We might say (if oversimply) that for Freud, our
cultural and personal problem is how to transcend the human. For
Winnicott, it is how to bear the exposure of being imperfectly
human. Play, art, and love come powerfully to our aid, but there
remains "the inherent difficulty in regard to human contact with
external reality."

Winnicott's theoretical writings emphasize empathy, imagination, and
the highly particular transactions that constitute love between two
imperfect people. One might have arrived at these ideas without
being able to translate them into analytic practice. According to
Harry Guntrip, who was analyzed by Fairbairn and then by Winnicott,
Fairbairn had this problem. His theories spoke of the importance of
a "personal relationship of genuine understanding" between
therapist and patient, and when he discussed his ideas outside the
office the two men communicated well. In the analytic setting,
however, Fairbairn became rigid and formal, imposing theory-based
interpretations rather than seeking out the core of the person.
Winnicott was entirely different. He quickly attained a more
satisfactory insight into Guntrip's idiosyncratic emotional
history, because he did not insist on seeing everything in terms of
a pre-established theoretical construct. And he was able to create
for the sixty-year-old analyst, a man of personal courage and
powerful intellect, a "holding environment," so that Guntrip's need
for constant activity and talk ceased, and he could enjoy simply
being himself. "I could let my tension go and develop and relax
because you were present in my inner world," he wrote in his
journal.

A pediatrician first and always, with adults or with children,
Winnicott was always willing to play, to respond to the moment, to
surprise, to adopt unconventional methods if they seemed right.
(All too often, he wrote, the patient brings his False Self into
analysis and the analyst addresses himself to that, because it is
easy to talk to a False Self.) Sometimes he sat on the floor;
sometimes he offered a cup of tea; sometimes he held a hand.
Sometimes sessions were daily and sometimes months apart. In the
case of "the Piggle," a little girl named Gabrielle who was two and
a half when she began to see Winnicott and five when she finished,
we have Winnicott's own detailed notes of every session. The
sessions were held on demand by the child, often months apart, and
sometimes included participation by the parents (sophisticated and
analytically aware) as well as letters and phone calls from them.

This remarkable document shows us many things about Winnicott as
therapist, but nothing more than his utter respect for the child's
world of objects. Almost his first remark, in notes of the first
session, is: "Already I had made friends with the teddy-bear who
was sitting on the floor by the desk." And throughout the analysis,
we sense that Winnicott's poetic capacity, his willingness not to
be "only sane," enables a degree of entry rare for any adult into
the unhappy child's world, with its "black mommy," its "Sush baby,"
and the terrifying "babacar." "To say that he understood children
would to me sound false and vaguely patronizing," said one
obituarist. "It was rather that children understood him." Such was
his respect for his young patient that he refused to get ahead of
her. "Importance of my not understanding what she had not yet been
able to give me clues for," he writes.

But understanding was not the whole of it. As both the Guntrip
analysis and the treatment of Gabrielle show, he also made both
children and adults feel the presence of a good mother, before whom
they were free to emerge. Rodman suggests that these great gifts
were not unconnected to Winnicott's ethical failures. He sometimes
felt, apparently, that he had moved beyond the need to consider
normal ethical rules. Since he could on occasion defy convention
with brilliant success, he trusted his own idiosyncratic judgment
too far.

One can find much to criticize in Winnicott's ideas, as well as in
his practical judgment. His account of the role of the father is
grossly deficient, perhaps as a result of the fact that he never
completely worked out his intuitive ideas about the malleability of
gender and the relationship between rigid gender norms and the
False Self. His ideas about the True Self sometimes verge on an
excessive romanticism, as when he suggests that any communication
with the outside world involves a deformation of a True Self, which
is fundamentally incommunicado. At other times he more plausibly
suggests that the True Self, if all goes well, will develop
capacities for communication and reciprocity. But the mark of his
childhood remained, and he repeatedly stressed (excessively, to my
mind) the artificiality of the social, the radically asocial nature
of all that is authentic. (Here he really is Bront's heir.)

I am also unconvinced by Winnicott's constant connection between
self- assertion and "hate," a word that he used too loosely. A
person who has been repressed by demands for conformity might
indeed hate those demands, and might feel the assertion of the self
as a form of aggression; and such, clearly, was Winnicott's
personal situation. But in the more benign case in which the
capacity for concern and social interaction develops in partnership
with love, self-assertion (and the sexuality that he linked to it)
may take a wider range of forms. Winnicott implicitly acknowledges
this, in his insightful remarks about art, culture, and play, but
these notions remain inconsistently integrated into his writings.

These are trivial matters, though, in comparison with the rich re-
orientation that Winnicott gave to the theory and the practice of
analysis. He was a poet among theoreticians, as he was a
compassionate doctor among analysts. If one can derive many related
insights from the reading of his favorite authors, such as
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Henry James, he was able to formulate
these insights into guidelines for the therapeutic treatment of
unhappy people, giving psychoanalysis a hopeful face, one that
emphasized people's capacities for love and society's capacity for
"holding" diversity, play, and freedom.

Indeed, one may learn many things about contemporary political life
by posing systematically the question of what it would be like for
society to become, in Winnicott's sense, a "facilitating
environment" for its citizens. In thinking this idea through, one
would come upon an enriched conception of the meaning of liberal
"individualism": not selfishness, but the ability to grow and to
express oneself; not solitary self-sufficiency, but "subtle
interplay"; not the transcendence of human passions, but the secure
"holding" of human need and imperfection.

In the end, the really important thing for Winnicott the theorist
was the genuine flourishing of each person, and the same was true
of Winnicott the doctor. At the end of his analysis of Gabrielle,
as the five-year-old prepares to leave him, he remarks, "So the
Winnicott you invented was all yours and he's now finished with,
and no one else can ever have him." The two sit together, reading
an animal book. Then he tells her, "I know when you are really shy,
and that is when you want to tell me that you love me." And he
records: "She was very positive in her gesture of assent."

By Martha C. Nussbaum

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