a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

It’s Sunday the 5^th of June, and I’m on my way back to Toronto after a weekend in London where I, wearing my historian of psychoanalysis hat, was doing a consultation with the Winnicott Trust. This is a group which oversees the literary estate of the pediatrician-psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1896-1971), and is now preparing a complete edition of his papers in some ten volumes.  The Winnicott papers will be the largest collection in English of a single individual’s psychoanalytic production since the Standard Edition translation of Freud (in 24 volumes) and the comparable Bolligen edition of Jung (in 19 volumes).

After Winnicott died in 1971, age 75, his widow Clare, a gifted social worker and writer, Winnicott’s collaborator in many projects and papers, started gathering up his publications, which had appeared in all kinds of places, from specialty pediatric journals to psychoanalytic journals to newsletters and pamphlets for parents. She and a group of colleagues began publishing these along with unpublished manuscripts they edited into publishable pieces. Until her own death, she worked with her editorial group and the Trust (established in 1983) grew out of their process, which it has continued on without Clare’s leadership. Other types of memorializations and extensions of Winnicott’s work have grown up over the years. There are foundations that support teaching of his psychotherapy techniques; clinics where practitioners in the Winnicottian tradition treat children; lecture series in which contemporary people talk about him and his work and his clinical legacy. The Squiggle Foundation by its very name shows that one of Winnicott’s most interesting innovations lives on: he developed a kind of game to play with children in which they drew a line –a squiggle–and then developed it into a drawing while and he talked with them about what they were making. From their drawings and their commentaries and associations to the drawings he could learn what was going on in their lives, what was on their conscious and unconscious minds.

Well, there will one day before too long be a complete collection of Winnicott’s papers, organized as it should be, introduced as it should be, published as it should be, and that tradition, with its roots in the late 1920s, when Winnicott was the first British pediatrician to train as a psychoanalyst, and its great moments of growth toward the end of WWII and on up to 1970, will be safe as long as the planet is. Passed on safely to a new generation of readers. “Basically,” I had suggested to the Trust, “the papers must be arranged chronologically, volume to volume and within each volume –no matter what kind of paper, no matter what the intended audience. Book reviews and relevant correspondence, too, need to be connected organically to the unfolding chronological line.  But I think you have to permit yourselves to depart now and again from the chronological line when there is an opportunity to put two or three pieces together that really need to be together, that will be orphaned if they are not together, that have a family-like bond that should be restored –a family bond that you know existed in their author’s mind, either because he said so or because you know he would have said so if you had the opportunity to ask him.”  Editing is an activity in the same family of activities as biography-writing; it can give a reader an experience of work coming alive again, as a well done lifestory can allow a reader to be, for a time, living with the subject as a  contemporary. Chronological time is a construction that enables generations that never met to live together in their cultural imaginations.

These thoughts and others on editing and producing and publishing issues delivered and discussed on Saturday, I went back to my hotel near the Embankment and left my briefcase in order to take a long, unencumbered walk and end up, later in the evening, at St. Paul’s Church where there was a concert scheduled.  The Embankment is my favorite London walkway, both because it takes you along the Thames, the great organizing line, the great squiggle, of London, once predominantly for commerce and now as much for culture. It leads you to the bridges –including the new Millenium Bridge, a foot bridge—where you can see so much past and imagine so much future. Almost everywhere you stop to take in the views, you can have a J.M.W Turner moment, especially on a day like Saturday, when the sunlight was brilliant, bouncing off every tower and spire, every dome and casement, every glass office block or metal museum facade. Hundreds of people were sunbathing on the astroturf square in front of the new National Theatre, while children played on the oversize, Alice in Wonderland green chairs, screaming with joy, hopping and jumping, spilling ice cream, and speaking all the languages of the earth.

I imagined Winnicott looking down on this scene from up on Waterloo Bridge. But I thought of him as a man of fifty, not long married to Clare, his second wife, childless himself, but newly settling in London after their stint of working in Oxfordshire with hundreds of other peoples’ children. The Winnicotts had both served the British evacuation effort, receiving children and youths who had been brought up from London to escape the Blitz, helping settle them into hostels or dorms or family foster placements—far from home, far from their parents, if their parents were still alive. Treating the traumatized, treating the anxiety-ridden, treating the “anti-social.” In London alone, nearly fifty thousand men, women and children had died in the Blitz.  In his day, Winnicott would have been looking out over an Embankment that had dozens of rubble filled plots along it where buildings ancient and modern had stood before the German bombs started falling, 76 consecutive nights running in 1940-41. It would have looked like the Mitte district of Berlin looked a few years later, bombed along either side of the River Spree, where what is today the Museumsinsel today nearly sank. As present-day Baghdad looks, on either side of the squiggling Eurphrates –I see it on the TV just now, as I am sitting here writing in the Air Canada Lounge of Heathrow International Airport, and another suicide bombing is being reported by the BBC.

Winnicott carried a lot of history of loss in him. He was a medical student during the First World War, so he was exempt from finding himself in France; but he lost many school friends in the trench warfare there and reflected often on his “survivor’s guilt.” He lost his mother when he was twenty-five, soon after he had had a kind of vision of himself as a doctor saving lives–including his own– and a therapist saving souls. He had always tried to save his mother from the sadness—perhaps it was, clinically, depression—that lived in her, forming a self so different than the one who kept a perfect, elegant house and was often out in society with her husband the Mayor of the seaside city of Plymouth, Fredrick Winnicott, a merchant and a strict Wesleyanite. Plymouth, too, was bombed heavily during the Blitz and children were also evacuated from there to survive the War and grow up in the dark, deprived years of Britain’s huge effort to rebuild and make a New Society. Winnicott was a writer of letters-to-the-editor, and several of his most pungent ones were about how the National Health Service should be set up to be maximally good, particularly for children. And as a theoretician he wrote about a True Self, ours form infancy, that must be protected by –not attacked by or defeated by—a Self that grows up around it in the course of a life, as it must be protected by the adults around, a ‘good enough mother,’ a good enough Society.

As I walked toward St. Paul’s, after the sun had gone down, I kept thinking about the volume of Winncott writings that I had proposed that the Trust call “Psychoanalysis in War-time,” which would show DWW commenting on the evacuee children and describing their lives, their needs. And he was doing this while the British Psychoanalytical Society was having an internal war of its own between followers of Melanie Klein and followers of Anna Freud, who had profound disagreements about infants’ and childrens’ needs and developments. How you treat and how you provide for and protect children depends, of course, on who you think they are as they are born and grow slowly up. How –and how much—do the environments of their families and their societies affect them?

I had a bite to eat in the square in front of St. Paul’s where there were dozens of buskers and jugglers and stand-up comics entertaining a huge and very international crowd, part of it seated in the outdoor restaurants, and part of it over-flowing from the nearby pubs, pints in hand. A mob of guys who looked like fans at a soccer match were raucous, roaring out their support for a guy like them who undressed himself while climbing up a fifty foot pole and telling mocking, lewd jokes along the way.  I was surprised by the festival –you would never know that Britain is in the grip of its worst financial crisis since those years right after the War.  All the afternoon amusements over on the Embankment had been free –no pounds Sterling and credit cards flying into the hands of waiters and barmen.

The crowd noise on the square outside ebbed and flowed behind the entire concert at St. Paul’s, challenging the concentration of the musicians and the conductor, who already had quite a challenge going on from their program, particularly Tchaikovsky’s  Symphony no. 5,  their finale, but also from Debussey’s Prelude a L’Apres-midi du’un Faune, their opener. But they flew with their music, just on the safe side of reckless. Michael Alexander Young, the conductor, doing the whole concert without a score, was brilliant and so intense, so interested in the wildly energetic passages of the music, the overcoming, triumphing, soaring horns and oboes and cymbals and tympanis. During Rossini’s William Tell Overture, the middle piece on the program, he almost drove right off his podium he was so caught up enacting in his body like a boy the most famous gallop in the history of music.

Like all his musicians, average age –I would guess—about twenty five, although the superb first violin Michael Foyle was only 19, Michael Alexander Young had donated his time for preparing and performing this concert. The Charities Philharmonia, a non-profit, has assembled several times a year since its founding in 2006 to raise money for a different cause each year. This year’s concert series is to aid Japan Disaster Relief. Most of the audience were British senior citizens, white-haired like me, although there were many young Japanese students and professionals in the pews, too.  But no British young people.

It certainly will be a complicated generation, this one, that faces up on a dreadful, demoralizing unemployment rate, a Tory “austerity” program for the country that means getting a university degree –or going to a conservatory–without a crushing burden of debt will be the privilege of the old privileged classes. This one, faced with a range of social and environmental problems that makes what those British senior citizen concert-goers faced when they were young look manageable will be deeply challenged. But, there in the midst of it, was a group of young musicians giving their time and talent to Japan Disaster Relief, to help a nation once the ally of the nation that blitzed London when their grandparents were children, some of whom got to go and see Dr. Winnicott and his friends.