Analysts on the Couch Part I: Donald W. Winnicott

Review of Brett Kahr, D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait. Madison, CT.: International Universities Press, 1996. ISBN 0823666840, xxix, 189 pp., $40.

There is a growing literature of the biography of psychoanalysts by analytically trained psychobiographers. J.D. Sutherland, Fairbairn’s Journey into the Interior (1989); Jeremy Hazell, H.J.S. Guntrip: A Psychoanalytical Biography (1996); and Brett Kahr, D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait (1996) set a standard of insight that will affect future literary attempts at interpreting personality. The combination of analyst subject and analyst biographer makes for a clarity of vision rarely encountered in biography. The material is uncommonly rich. Two of the analysts, Ronald Fairbairn and Harry Guntrip, kept journals of their subjective lives, while Donald Winnicott left extensive correspondence and personal papers. Guntrip and Winnicott were prolific writers, and Fairbairn, while more parsimonious with words, fully articulated his pioneering object relations theory of the personality.

Brett Kahr’s relationship with his subject is more distant than Hazell’s and Sutherland’s with their subjects, as he did not know Winnicott personally, instead reconstructing his subject’s life story from interviews and from unpublished writings to which he had full access. Kahr, an American by birth and education, is Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy at Regents College, London, and Visiting Staff Member, Child and Family Department of the Tavistock Clinic. John D. Sutherland, Fairbairn’s biographer, became an elder statement of British psychoanalysis, having served as Medical Director of the Tavistock Clinic and having done extensive editorial duties including editing the International Journal of Psycho-analysis. Sutherland knew Fairbairn well throughout his working life and had a five-year personal analysis with him. Jeremy Hazell, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, had a five-year training analysis with Harry Guntrip. His is the most detailed and harrowing account of the three; Sutherland’s is necessarily the most speculative, while Kahr disarmingly calls his study of Winnicott “a mere sketch” towards a comprehensive biography. Together they deliver a force of insight hardly imaginable from non-analytically trained writers. This first part of my essay will focus on Kahr’s Winnicott and the subsequent part (in the next issue of Clio’s

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Psyche) will be on the books by Sutherland and Hazell.

Brett Kahr’s D.W. Winnicott is a brief, pungent summary of the psychological development and career of Britain’s most influential child analyst. Winnicott (1896-1971) did more to reform authoritarian child rearing than anyone in his generation, apart from Benjamin Spock in America. A leader in the “Independent” group of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, Winnicott not only wrote many papers now regarded as classic, he also lectured, taught, and gave radio broadcasts advocating humane parenting. Legendary in his lifetime, he extended his remarkable gift for communicating with mothers and children to an evergrowing appreciative audience. Yet Winnicott’s was a complicated and, in some respects, lastingly troubled personality of whom Kahr accounts with admirable clarity and balance. Though this is not a detailed life, all the essential considerations for a full psychobiography are present.

Kahr’s combination of directness and tact in dealing with Winnicott’s psychopathology comes through especially in the passages on his reason for entering analysis with James Strachey in London. The young Cambridge and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital-trained pediatrician first consulted Dr. Ernest Jones who sent him on to Strachey in 1924 for analysis that lasted ten years. As Winnicott put it, “Through personal difficulties I came into psychoanalysis at an early stage in my work as a children’s doctor” (p. 44). Psychobiographers will do well to watch Kahr as he moves through the sensitive territory opened by Winnicott’s admission that he was “ill.” Using evidence that Winnicott was more than just “inhibited,” as could be true of any late Victorian, he skillfully moves to the specifics, first conceding that there is “no concrete evidence whatsoever on which to base any hypotheses,” then going on to examine the hearsay evidence for Winnicott’s psychosexual conflicts (p. 45). In early life, Winnicott’s dominant heterosexuality, accompanied by impotence, could well have led to emotional suffering he called “illness.” Corroboration is locked up in the Strachey case notes.

Winnicott’s first marriage to a disturbed woman compounded difficulties for which analysis with Strachey was helpful, but Strachey’s own sexual ambiguity leads Kahr to wonder whether, long-term, he was the right analyst for Winnicott. Although married, Strachey’s preference was homosexual, probably causing Winnicott “considerable homosexual anxiety in the first months of intimate treatment with Strachey” (p. 51). Kahr suggests that Strachey neglected to analyze Winnicott’s insecure sexual orientation due to “malignant countertransference” (pp. 51-52). Yet he thinks that Strachey was genuinely sustaining through difficult events, despite Winnicott’s final judgement that while Strachey adhered to classical technique, making “practically no mistakes,” the treatment results were disappointing (pp. 54-55). A further five years of treatment with Melanie Klein’s follower Joan Riviere confirmed the direction of Winnicott’s search but left him no further ahead with his own difficulty. Altogether, negative experiences with classical Freudian analysis, and its variant in Kleinianism, turned Winnicott towards the heresy of environmental studies of mothers and infants — aligning him with Fairbairn, despite a reluctance to acknowledge it.

The picture of Winnicott’s childhood is consistent with lifelong psychosexual difficulties. Viewed superficially, Winnicott’s upper middle class upbringing in a large Victorian house in Plymouth, Devon, looks ideal. He enjoyed all the privileges of an established and affluent merchant family headed by his father, Sir Frederick Winnicott, sometime mayor of the city. His schooling and university were accordingly privileged, but Kahr sees the developmental drawbacks of a dominantly female household for what they were. While there is no evidence for dramatic impingements or abuses, and no losses by death, Winnicott’s caregivers were too overwhelmingly female for him to acquire secure maleness. His father, a liberal-minded Methodist, was largely unavailable to his son, although he exemplified free religious enquiry. Winnicott’s notable open-mindedness in the disputatious days of psychoanalytic controversy in London may well trace to the religious toleration taught by his father. But as to real companionship, there was a lack. As Kahr writes, “Father Winnicott dedicated so much of his time to the city that he seems to have spent very few hours at home, leaving his son surrounded by [a] bevy of women: mother, sisters, aunts, nanny, governess, cook, [and] maids as well as the many female relations who lived across the road….” (p. 5). The result was a “powerful female identification” and “an extreme fascination with the inner world of the female — an interest that eventually became his life’s work … the exploration of the essence of motherhood and … examination

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of the child’s relationship with the mother” (p. 6). But why was female identification so intense, and why was it so fraught with ambivalence?

There is evidence in a childhood doll-bashing incident of envious rivalry with Winnicott’s elder sisters, but more important are his feelings about his depressed mother, Elizabeth. As Winnicott himself wrote, his father “left me too much to all my mothers. Things never quite righted themselves” (p. 10); but, more fatefully, Sir Frederick delegated his only son to be his depressed wife’s caregiver — a task he perhaps too conscientiously fulfilled.

Even lacking a detailed account of Winnicott’s relations with his depressed mother and the many females in his childhood, we can see that Kahr’s emphasis is right. Winnicott was devoted to women in the most chaste and caring way possible, able to engage with them in therapy because he was sexually avoidant. He is surely unique in ability to expound the power and intricacy of what goes on between mother and infant. This led to the most startlingly original papers on development, creativity, and unconscious fantasy in our era, “The Use of An Object” (1969) foremost among them. It was this paper that got Winnicott in such trouble with New York Freudians because it insisted on a degree of mother-infant interaction hitherto absent from theory. On the sexual margin, freed of inhibitions, and quirky in his use of language, Winnicott was unafraid to say what he thought much as he thought it. He devised his own ‘poetic’ style to say the nearly unsayable, never very systematically, but with a liberating influence for those dealing with children at all levels. Winnicott himself is remembered as “an eternal child” (p. 133), who loved to invent games, especially the famed “Squiggle Game.” He was not a Rousseau-like believer in primitive goodness, insisting upon the paradox of loving empathy and unavoidable hostility in human relations. Kahr’s shrewd biographical portrait greatly improves the intelligibility of Winnicott’s unique contribution to human understanding.

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