a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Since I began this blog in May of 2010, I have missed my self-assigned goal of writing a post each week only twice –once in the fall of 2010 when I was traveling in Holland and England without a moment of unscheduled time, and then last week, when I had returned to Toronto after another trip to England (which I wrote about in my last post, #55). Both times, D.W. Winnicott was on my mind, because both times I had been in discussion with the members of the Winnicott Trust about their project of producing a Collected Writings of D. W. Winnicott.

Well, as things have turned out, to cut a long story short,  the Winnicott Trust and I are now in the process of making a formal agreement for me to be the General Editor of this Collected Writings of D. W. Winnicott, in ten (by current estimate) chronologically arranged volumes. Ten volumes! I greet this development with great pleasure and anticipation, but it has totally amazed and preoccupied me over the past week, to the point where I could not turn my attention to the blog or to any other intellectual project –not even to the project of making the final little nip and tuck adjustments to the copyedited manuscript of a book of mine called Childism, which is due at my publisher’s by the end of June. That is, very soon.

What I observe going on in my own mind and emotions is curious to me: it is as though I, at the age of 65, have made a carefully considered decision to adopt an orphaned child –or really it is ten children, a whole sibling group, dectuplets—and my attention is all given over to how this decision and its obligations are going to be managed, how my life – my intellectual life and my domestic life—is going to be rearranged to accommodate and properly care for these children, help them grow healthily from newborns into grown-ups (in just a few years).  I wake up in the middle of the night with foster parental-organizational thoughts.  They need names. “Ah, yes, I will call that volume ‘Discovering Psychoanalysis,’ and this other one ‘The True Self and the False Self.’ That one already has the name ‘Human Nature,’ but maybe it should  become volume ten rather than volume four since it was started in 1954, reorganized in 1967, and left unfinished.” Winnicott himself wrote very interestingly about the “primary maternal preoccupation” that overtakes women expecting and then giving birth to a baby and giving the baby its initial tending. I am in primary adoptive preoccupation. For the moment, nothing else is mattering.  Christine said at breakfast: “Relax, give it time, it will all get sorted.”

This morning, when I woke up with this naming of the volumes going on in my head, I was reminded of the time in 1986 when I flew back from England after the last research trip I made for my biography of Anna Freud. I was exhausted, and slept through the whole plane trip.   As I woke up, descending into New York, I knew that I had had a dream about Anna Freud, but I could not quite remember it. Then, slowly, it came back to me –or the end of it did. I was a spectator in the dream, standing on Hampstead Heath, a huge “nature park” in North London, near the house where Freud and his family settled in 1938, after they fled Austria, and where Anna Freud lived until her death in 1982, at age 87.  Coming toward me on one of the Heath’s untrimmed paths was a little wizened woman –Anna Freud—in a wheel chair. The chair was being pushed along by Manna Freidman, who had taught in Anna Freud’s nursery school at the Hampstead Centre and who had, in her own retirement, taken on the role of Anna Freud’s nanny-companion.  I had interviewed her the day before at her London home, and she had given me a great gift: the diary she had kept during the last year of Anna Freud’s life. As they drew closer to me in the dream, I could hear them speaking German, and I saw that Anna Freud was wearing her father’s winter coat, his Lodenmantel, which she had kept carefully  preserved in their house since his death in 1939. In my dream, I spoke a sentence: “Then, when they went off to the park, the Kinderfrau and Anna Freud, she, shrunken to the size of a schoolgirl, sat wrapped inside her father’s big wool coat.”

That sentence, which I wrote down when I was remembering the dream in the airplane, is now the last sentence of Anna Freud: A Biography. It was based on a story Manna Freidman had told me during our interview, but it had, in my unconscious mind, gotten a particular form:  it had acquired that unusually set subordinate clause that would make a reader slow down, take a breath, and allow herself or himself to merge with, to in-take, the still at the end of the sentence –like a still photograph or a painted still life–of the  little old daughter with her absent but very present father enwrapping her.  Unconsciously, I had chosen to end the biography with this tableau, and not with a death scene; she is in a childhood; she is in no-time.

I find it fascinating how one’s unconscious mind seizes on what Freud called “the day residue”  (something that happens during the day before a dream, and is registered, remembered, but perhaps not underlined or highlighted in any way) and then builds a dream around it or resets it in new dream-context.  Sometimes the day residue is a scene, like the scene of Anna Freud being taken for what Manna had called a “fresh airing”; sometimes it is an emotion; sometimes a fantasy.  Something that matters.   And, for a biographer, something that captures an essential element of the subject: Anna Freud as her father’s daughter, being tenderly mothered by her old age nanny, her Kinderfrau.

So I ask myself about this image that I have now of D.W.Winnicott as ten not-yet children whom I am going to adopt and raise properly, send them out into the world properly organized, properly dressed. They have a birth order –from volume one to volume ten—but they will all be in my charge for the same amount of time and go forth together, in a set.  I think that partly I think of them as orphans because the project of The Collected Writings of D.W.Winnicott has been around for a long time, but has never gotten securely launched.  Winnicott had an analysand named Masud Khan, a Pakistani-born child analyst, quite a wild child of the tribal Punjab himself, who, functioned as his editor, taking rough-sketched papers or notes for talks and helping craft them into publishable articles, sometimes even with notes, bibliographies and other scholarly trappings. Khan was very disappointed not to have been appointed Winnicott’s literary executor by the terms of his will. Whether this was something Winnicott had indeed promised him or something Khan –and many others–simply expected because Khan had been for so long his editor is not known, but the upshot was that Winnicott did not designate an executor so the role fell to his widow, Clare. Nonetheless, Khan had proposed to Clare, with whom he was not on good terms, that a Collected Writings should be  prepared –under his editorship. Instead, she and various others over the years until her own death in 1984, started to bring out one volume after another of thematically arranged papers. As of last year, there were some 23 of these volumes –all good enough productions, but not constituting a Collected Writings. Not what Khan had envisaged –something like the Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, which had been translated and edited over the course of many years by James Strachey, who was Masud Khan’s first analyst after Khan  arrived in London from Pakistan as a young man with only a schoolboy’s knowledge of Freud.

After Clare Winnicott’s death, various proposals for a Collected Writings came forth, and work on assembling Winnicott’s papers and unpublished papers and correspondences continued. Most of the papers are now carefully and very professionally archived  at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. But no publishing contract was signed, no definitive move forward was made. So that means that the Collected Writings idea is about thirty years old but unadopted –although two generations of Winnicott Trust members never let it expire, remaining devoted to it as to Winnicott himself.

In a way, it is not surprising that D.W. Winnicott’s writings have resisted (if I may continue to anthropomorphize them, and now attribute agency to them) getting into something as definitive and formal as a Collected Writings.  As I am discovering while reading through the papers and various unsuccessful attempts at biographies of him, the man himself was completely dedicated to not being put into any kind of box. A box, a coffin. He was inveterately “non-conforming,” to use the word that is used for English, Scotish and Welsh churches that are not in or of the Anglican state Church of England, a list which included the Wesleyanites (Methodists, in American), the church of his father’s people. When he was a young man, Winnicott even non-conformed to the non-conformists, whom he thought cult-like, to join –in the loosest possible non-church-going way—the Anglicans, who had once, after all, been non-conforming in relaton to the Church of Rome.  Before his mother had joined up by marriage with the very strict Wesleyanite Winnicotts,  she had been an Anglican. In the Anglican Church, you can be much more attached to the Virgin than in any mere Protestantism –without getting boxed into any form of Catholic Mariology.

When D.W. Winnicott thought he was being typed or labeled, he rebelled; when he thought he was entering into someone else’s idea or icon or ideology, he rebelled; when he thought someone he cared about was becoming rigid, doctrinaire, or closed to new experience, he reprimanded that person. He even reprimanded Melanie Klein for being a Kleinian and all her ordained followers for having a Melaniology. His gods were not the Apollonian ones, but the Dionysian ones:  creativity, spontaneity, playfulness, artistry, aliveness, mobility, ability to perform what the Viennese analyst Ernst Kris (an art historian by original training) had once called “regression in the service of the ego,” a kind of return to childlikeness in the service of a richer, freer, more progressive and expressive adulthood. Later, Winnicott wrote about “regression to dependence” as a possibility in the analytic situation and as something severely disturbed patients need, if they can manage it or be managed in it: the analysand feels safe enough or properly challenged and encouraged enough to feel deeply dependent upon the analyst and able to let go –for a time—of his or her “false self.”  To get back in this painful nakedness to a moment in infant life when living in the world became impossible, when adaptation to the external world –the “impinging” world—became too dangerous. To be a babe in arms –and not, for a time, a babe ill-mothered child or a motherless, without the arms of a “good enough mother.” “Psychotic illness is related to environmental failure at an early stage of the emotional development of the individual. The sense of futility and unreality belongs to the development of a false self which develops in protection of the true self” (1954).

There are coats that protect children against the cold, more or less, and there are various kinds of straight-jackets. The false self is a straight-jacket –partly offered by not good enough others, and partly self-made.  Anna Freud called the ingredients of the “false self” that she had studied and parsed the “mechanisms of defense.” But Winnicott’s sense for the forms and types of “false self” ingredients and how they can show up in a therapy was more complex than Anna Freud’s: in his estimation, she was too much in her father’s way of thinking, not focused enough on infancy rather than later childhood, and he, Winnicott, although he always thought of himself as a Freudian, was not going to be in any Freudian box.  Psychoanalysis is a discipline that is riven with schools of thought, types of techniques, theoretical commitments, the narcissism of small differences; and then there is Winnicott, anti-school, forever truant, in perpetual intellectual motion, refusing to be constrained or hemmed in in any way.

The counterpart of the “false self” is the “true self.”  About which Winnicott said many enigmatic things, not one of which could or should be construed as a definition or a box. Scholars of psychoanalysis and practitioner psychoanalysts, particularly ones who want Winnicott to be a Romantic with a notion of the pure and innocently sociable self of Everyinfancy, have pondered for decades over runes like this: the true self is “an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound” (1963).  That does not make the true self seem like a bulb that, in the right soil, with the right, dependable cultivation, will grow into a flower. Winnicott was, by the time of his death, both the most beloved and admired of the post-war British analysts, a man of many compassionate –literally, shared passions—relationships, and someone quite alone; a man of collaborations and shared projects and someone lonely in his enormous theoretical and therapeutic ambition for himself.  His Collected Writings should show him in his multiplicity. Ten volumes should do it.