a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

As you know from my recent blog posts (#54-56), I am in the process of taking on the job of General Editor of The Collected Writings of D.W. Winnicott. Already, with my contract still being worked out, I have become preoccupied by Winnicott and by the magnitude of my task. Because it is proving so difficult to do at the same time this new editing job, my on-going blog-writing job, my lecture preparation obligations, and my co-direction of Caversham Productions (where we have just published an eBook primer entitled What is Psychoanalysis? through Kindle), I have made two decisions. The first is to post to this blog less frequently (every other week or so rather than weekly for at least the next few months, while I get reoriented). And the second is to integrate into the blog, whenever it seems right to me, the work I am doing to learn my way around Winnicott’s papers. “Right” means that the blog should not lose its “Who’s Afraid of Social Democracy?” focus. And it should not disappoint readers who have subscribed to it for that focus. Combining psychoanalytic perspective and political theory (and political history) as I have been trying to do on this blog will continue as my goal. Fortunately, not only was the pediatrician/psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott unafraid of Social Democracy, he made psychoanalytic contributions to thinking about it, and I will present these as I become better acquainted with them and understand them in their historical contexts. For starters, I began to write the reflection below on the 4th of July, 2011.

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Winnicott was keenly aware that people are both defined by and limited by their characters, which meant, for him, by the level and type of their emotional development. People are more or less mature in their emotional development; and. he thought, their maturity could be assessed psychoanalytically–a possibility that is often dismissed in our “post-modern” era as a pretension, a piece of pseudo-scientific arrogance or of unconscious cultural prejudices about what constitutes maturity and who gets to judge. To Winnicott, it seemed psychoanalytically obvious that, because of the kinds of characters we are, we can each accomplish some things and not others; no one is a superperson of total competence or a person without competences. Among the multitudes of variations of people types, there are some who do some things superlatively and other things not at all well or not at all. That, he argued, was the case with Winston Churchill as he led the British brilliantly in their defense against the Nazi effort, begun in September 1940, to invade Great Britain by air and bomb its cities and its citizens to smithereens.

During the Blitz, which in its six months of night after night torment claimed the lives of close to fifty thousand British and émigré men, women and children, Winnicott, who was working for the evacuation services that removed children from the most heavily bombed cities into the countryside, wrote a “Discussion of War Aims” in which he noted: “There is no clear reason why an ability to lead a country to victory should carry with it an ability to discuss war aims, and it may be important that we do not force the Prime Minister to do something out of character. What Mister Churchill is shy of doing, however, we who have less direct responsibility can do with profit. We can examine the possibility that we do stand for something valuable, and if we think we do, we can try to work out just what that something may be. And when the words ‘Democracy’ and ‘Freedom’ appear in that discussion, we can try to understand what these words mean.”

Although the Prime Minister could inspire (and accept a great deal of hero-worship in return) and he could command (exercising a good deal of domestic political control at the same time, for which many—but not Winnicott–were grateful), what the remarkable Mister Churchill could not do was challenge his people’s sense of their goodness or his sense of his own goodness. (As it were, their “British exceptionalism.”) The forty-four year old Doctor Winnicott did just this in the privacy of a professional meeting, as his own character and developmental history demanded that he leave no opinion whatsoever unchallenged. His skeptical streak was very deep, and his nose for pretence unfailing. “In my opinion, it is no use pretending that human nature is fundamentally different in Germany and in Great Britain,” Doctor Winnicott said, bluntly, although the behavior of the peoples of the two countries was, then, manifestly different and that difference needed an exploration. Operating without exceptionalist pretence, the exploration would need to take into account the difference between behavior, which can be observed, and “total behavior,” which always and in every population involves more than meets the eye. It involves “historical responsibility,” and also “the widening of the basis of motivation through one’s unconscious identification with one’s enemies,” and “the capacity of the individual to get gratification in connection with ideas, perhaps aggressive or cruel ideas, and to derive relief when intolerable ideas that threaten to become conscious are acted out –that is, when responsibility for them is shared by the other members of a group.” In two sentences, he had outlined a full program for a much needed psychoanalytic theory of groups.

As part of his unceasing effort to understand the aggressiveness in human nature, Winnioctt was warning that without taking into account the ways in which all people are capable of acting aggressively, individually and in groups, it is impossible to examine “the possibility that we [British] do stand for something valuable.” From this position, he could see some advantage for the British that they had an enemy who declared himself, in the manner of a Richard III, determined to prove a villain. “I am bad; I intend to be bad,” said Hitler in effect, and bombs away. The unconcealed intention allowed the British to try to distinguish themselves. But, if they self-righteously got into a we-are-good and you-are-bad way of thinking they would not only be misunderstanding human nature, they would be leaving themselves vulnerable to Hitler and his tactics, which centrally involved “his power to break up his opponents from within.” “He lures them into a position of righteousness which breaks down because it is false.”

The true way, the difficult way, for an individual to think about total behavior and human nature is to admit as fearlessly as possible “that all the greed, aggression, and deceit in the world might have been his own responsibility, even if in point of fact it is not. The same is true for the State as for the individual.” The person or State capable of discovering internally the potentiality for greed and aggression and deceit in human affairs has the possibility of understanding “that greed is love in a primitive form,” an immature form. And the possibility of understanding “that the compulsion to attain power can spring from fear of chaos and uncontrol.” An enlightened, realistic person or State has the possibility of aiming for something that greed, aggression, and deceit can never bring: that is, of aiming at attaining a more mature stage of emotional development than one’s enemies have attained. From a truly attained higher ground of maturity (of maturity, not morality), it would not be self-righteous to say that the Nazis were behaving like adolescents or pre-adolescents and the British were behaving like adults. Or, more accurately: “Probably our claim is that the Nazis are confidently pre-adolescent [and thus cannot understand what they are doing] and that we are struggling to be adults.” “We are trying to feel free as well as to be free, and to be willing to fight without being pugnacious, to be potential fighters interested in the arts of peace.”

A person who is truly capable of understanding that human nature is human nature and not different from population to population, can look at the histories of groups and say that in this group people could feel and be free, while in that other one “the total behavior” was of people neither feeling nor being free. There are criteria. But no one will arrive at those criteria unless he or she admits that freedom “puts a strain on the individual’s whole personality.” A free person gets no relief from projecting badness onto others, from identifying with the aggressor, or sharing feelings of being persecuted with fellow submissive citizens looking for a hero to worship. So almost everyone who feels or is free will, at some point, fall back from that free position out of exhaustion or out of longing for the excitement that comes with being told what to do, with being controlled. (”The ideas of cruelty and slavery are notoriously associated with bodily excitement and sensual experiences,” whereas feeling free, when it is an attained state, not in the achieiving, “involves but little bodily excitement”). Even people who have made a large, world-historical effort to tackle problems of unfreedom –as the Americans and the British did in relation to “the enslavement of African Negroes”—seldom finish their task and continue to fail it in one way or another the project of emancipation. The anti-slavery effort, further, usually provides “a false uneasiness about our own freedom.”

People who feel and are free tend to want, in their stronger more mature moments (usually between wars or away from the excitements of revolutions or wars) to exercise their freedom in a democracy of some sort, that is, in a political arrangement where they not only elect their leaders but also get rid of their leaders, taking responsibility for the change of leadership. (A constitutional monarchy dilutes this exercise of freedom, as does the existence of an unelected parliamentary House of Lords. A first-past-the-post election system like the one here in Canada was,
he thought, rightly, a travesty of the one person-one vote principle.) But in a democracy citizens have to be able to tolerate not getting the leader they want or having their opinions temporarily eclipsed if the leader who represents those opinions is not elected. “This willingness to put up with not getting one’s own way if one cannot get the support of the majority is a remarkable human achievement involving much strain and pain.” Rare is the people that can stand that strain and pain for more than a generation. And rare –in modern times–is the leader who does not want to stay on and on, retiring in old age or dying in office, rather than allowing for the generational refreshment of the feeling of freedom. (America has suffered so profoundly in recent decades from men who could not give up trying to win our recent lost wars, particularly the Vietnam War; and they –perpetual adolescents– have been of quite different character than their elders who won the Second World War and stayed on to try to assure that the victory not be squandered by the McCarthyite Americans –also perpetual adolescents–who imitated their authoritarian enemies during the Cold War.)

Winnicott took it for granted that democracies need to be organized to permit “ a periodical illogical riddance of the leader.” If a leader propounds the idea that stability depends upon him and the people’s submission to his plans, he is a dictator –no matter what improvements he may have made while his state and his people were without parliamentary means to remove him. “We have dictators all over the place…” Winnicott said in 1940, as we might say today, where appeals to stability and security resound and the idea that people might need “a periodical illogical riddance of the leader” is so easily denounced as anarchy. Although not by the young of the Arab Spring.

Winnicott had in mind that political leaders who stay on and on or who become dictators provoke “a whole series of phenomena that cluster round unexpressed hate and ungratified aggressiveness.” The people, especially the young, become restive as their leaders grow into rigid, overbearing fathers (or even quite mad, paranoid fathers) who actually incite their people to enact an adolescent rebellion, which may be a necessary and good thing if there is no other way for the next generation to feel and to be free and to grow into mature adults. But it is dangerous, for the rebels must split their father-figure, making him all-bad and ignoring whatever might have been good in him (perhaps he was a reformer himself back in the day). Then they can attack the bad. Splitting does not promote the key ingredient of democracy: “a mature sharing of responsibility,” including between the generations. (This is Winnicott’s analysis of why revolutionaries so consistently become Jacobins and “devour their children” –unless they have a Constitution which they allow to restrain them, as the American Founding Fathers did even while they argued over its meaning. When people think they have a lock on the meaning of their Constitution, they are in trouble.)

In any generation, Winnicott held, there will be a few men and women who can maintain (or we might say: sustain, endure) the stressful feeling of freedom without falling into needing to be controlled or needing to control. These mature ones “do not necessarily achieve fame”; they are seldom the political elite. But they do have influence in their communities. And a democracy is healthy and mature to the extent that they can live in it and help bring out “the innate democratic tendency” in it as a good parent does with innately freedom-loving children. In a piece called “The Meaning of the Word Democracy” which he wrote in 1950 and published then –the war aims piece I have been citing was not published until 1986, fifteen years after his death!—Winnicott said this about the few who are able to tolerate freedom: “..The natural tendencies in human nature (hereditary) bud and flower into the democratic way of life (social maturity), but this only happens through the healthy emotional development of the individuals; only a proportion of individuals in a social group will have had the luck to develop to maturity, and therefore it is only through them that the innate (inherited) tendency of the group towards social maturity can be implemented.”

As a developmental thinker, a pediatrician and a psychoanalytic clinician, Winnicott concluded the original matrix in which maturation is a possibility is the family: “The innate democratic factor in a community derives from the workings of the ordinary good home.” Many political theorists have emphasized that democracy must grow “from the bottom up,” from the grassroots,” from the local councils to the federal elected representatives, but it needed a Winnicott –and a cohort of like-minded others–to say clearly and in detail that those grassroots –those scions—need to be raised in ordinary good homes, to which the society, in turn, gives support and recognition of how much help good-childrearing requires. After the War, this became the key psychological insight of the social democracies.