a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Last June, I sat on the veranda of the Arowhon Pines Lodge in the Algonquin  National Park –Canada’s largest nature conservancy–watching through a pair of binoculars as a  small loon on the far side of  Little Lake Joe swam along peacefully and then, suddenly, dove out of sight.  I waited for her to surface.  She was gone for so long that I thought I must have missed her reappearance. Then, three hundred yards or so off to the west, she came up, shook the water off her beautiful black and white head, and paddled on, munching on the plant that drooped down from either side of her beak.

This afternoon, as I surfaced after three months of immersion in the writings of D.W. Winnicott and decided to write this blogpost, I remembered that loon. How effortlessly she had gone deep lake diving, and how gracefully she had come up, as though it were nothing  to have covered three underwater soccer fields of distance in one descent.  But I also associated to her because I know that loons have lent their name to how I think I have been for three months:  loony. When they are escaping danger, loons dart this way and that before they dive, and when they come up far away they scooter here and there until they are sure they have out-swum or faked out their predators.  “Loony” has a second derivation, too, from “lunatic,” a person who darts around intrapsychically, driven temporarily insane by the movements of the luna, the moon.  But mine was the first kind of loonacy: deeply into something, deeply down into something.  And, coming up, I feel myself to be, somehow, a different person.

For three months, I did very little but eat, sleep, do my household and business tasks, and read Winnicott.  Christine and I have had our usual talking times together –in the morning, reading the newspapers before work; at the end of the day, talking and watching the BBC late news; driving to our country house for the weekends—but, as she reminded me today, much of this time has been filled with talking about Winnicott.  Christine is writing a paper now, a psychoanalytic case study of someone most psychiatrists would dismissively call a “bad borderline” in need of medication rather than psychoanalysis, and her paper has, like us, become  more Winnicottian.  Her work with this patient has, also, of course, become more  Winnicottian as she has read everything that I put on her desk with a note: ”You must read this.”  The patient, too, has become more Winnicottian, although even before the summer she was in a state Winnicott called “regression to dependence.”  That has been my state, too: my loonacy was a regression to dependence on Winnicott, as though he were my analyst and I had given myself over to paying attention to him and learning from him.  But it is Christine who has had to listen to me talk, telling what I have been thinking about Winnicott.  As I have taken him in — “a good feed” in his terms -–I have been able to produce a preliminary plan for The Collected Writings of  D.W. Winnicott.

There are now drafts of tables of contents for eleven volumes.   Close to a thousand texts of varying lengths have been ordered following a chronological principle, but departing from that principle when necessary for one reason or another to get the big mosaic to make emotional and intellectual sense and not be just one damn thing after another.  Eleven stout three-ring notebooks full of printed-on-paper texts can stand together now on a shelf in my office awaiting the next step, which will be for me to read through them one after the other, going much more slowly, unloony, questioning and adjusting the order I have made and beginning to make marginal notes  cross referencing the papers.  I’ll have to make sure that my loonacy was not the wrong kind of crazy—that is, making sense only to me and only for the loony moment.  I also have to make sure that I do, in fact, have in my collection all the writings. During the last three months, I have discovered by on-line searching a few small texts –-mostly brief book reviews and letters to the editors of newspaper and journals—that have not been discovered  by Winnicott’s previous bibliographers, editors and archivists.  Each new discovery has increased my amazement at how much Winnicott wrote during the forty four years between his first pediatric publication in 1926 (when he was 31) and his last psychoanalytic one in 1970 (when he was 75). In his last decade, he produced the talks and papers that fill four of my planned stout volumes.

No psychoanalyst in the generations after Freud and Jung has written as those two did.  Twenty three volumes for Freud, plus multiple huge correspondences; over fifty volumes for Jung in the new edition that is now in progress at the Philemon Foundation in Zurich (which is projected to take thirty years to finish!)  Even the prolific Sandor Ferenczi was not in their league. The Writings of Anna Freud in eight volumes and the four volumes produced by the Melanie Klein Trust are the largest editions among the second generation Freudians, those of Winnicott’s generation chronologically, although the ladies began publishing as analysts a decade before he did. These great contributors wrote books as well as papers, but Winnicott wrote only papers and short pieces –although in 1954 he started a book, Human Nature,  that was not ready to finish at the time  (and he did not live to finish the rewrite and revision of it he started in 1967).

There was no big launch book, like Freud’s The Interpretation of  Dreams or Anna Freud’s The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense or Klein’s The Psychoanalysis of Children.  No book that said ‘this is the kind of psychoanalyst I am –here is where my passion for psychoanalytic focuses.’  Winnicott grew and shifted and experimented, taking a lifetime of work to discover himself and understand how he was an analyst; how his child, adolescent and adult patients could and did, as he put it in 1968, use him. His theory took off in spurts, his technique changed  with it, and vice versa.  At the beginning of his last decade of practice and writing, he had a key self-analytical revelation as he read and reviewed and dreamt about Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1961). This analysis-by-book took him, he said, beyond what he had been able to discover about himself in his two analyses with Joan Riviere and James Strachey (the General Editor of Freud’s collected writings, the Standard Edition).  He and Jung had something deeply in common, he felt: in childhood, they had each suffered what he called a split and each had tried to heal and be healed, coming only late in their lives to an understanding of what had happened, long after they had established themselves as experts in childhood psychic splits and childhood psychosis.

Reading is such a peculiar process even when it is done normally –much less when it is done in a condition of loonacy.  As you go through the book or books step by step, finding your way, holding and ordering what you have read as you read on, and anticipating what you are going to read as you remember, you come to know the author’s mind, the author’s thinking style and writing style (that mysterious quality), and you can –as a psychoanalyst can with a patient’s dream— follow the author-leader on the trail he or she is carving.  Although with a good writer there will always be surprises, as the writer darts around in loonacy, out of anxiety or out of exuberance, who knows, there will also always be a trail, a track.  But the reading process is also deeply passive, or perhaps receptive is a better word.  It requires a little “regression to dependence” in you as a reader: you lie at your author’s breast and imbibe. Of course, there, too, you have to actively –even aggressively– suck in order to be receptive.

One of the weeks during which I was reading Winnicott, and deep into the late essays collected in Playing and Reality (1971), I was in West Seattle with my nephew Jon and his wife Erin, whose first child, Walt, was born on August 6^th.  As I am privileged to count Jon a kind of son, my visit was ‘from grandmother,’  to lend a hand. This meant that Walt sometimes came to sleep on my chest after he had had a meal from his mother, so she could have a little while to herself –to take a shower,  get dressed, make a cup of tea. Except when Walt was sleeping, life was totally organized around breast feeding and diaper changing –three adults sharing the diaper changing, but only one, of course, doing the breast feeding. And only one little guy in the condition Winnicott called absolute dependence.  I tried not to make a display of my loonacy as I kept quoting from Winnicott’s Mother and Child (1957), particularly the lovely talks for parents called “Infant Feeding,” and “Where the Food Goes,” and “Why Do Babies Cry?”

One day, while Jon was at work, Erin and Walt (in his stroller) and I walked to the nearby shopping area, where there is, conveniently, a lactation center. The purpose of our trip was to buy a breast pump.  Erin is, by American standards, fortunate to have a maternity leave of six months –we know young women who have six weeks, which is not enough to recover from the birth, much less give a baby the care the baby needs, the “primary maternal preoccupation” (in you know who’sphrase). Christine’s Canadian daughter had a year’s leave, and her husband six weeks. Erin wants to start expressing milk and freezing it now, while she can be at home with Walt, so that she can transition him slowly to a combination of nursing and bottle feeding with her own milk when she prepares to return to her job. (She  assesses wetlands for the Environmental Protection Agency, the purpose of which Agency is, of course, daily called into question by people who do not have her child’s best interests at heart).

I am happy to report that the lactation center in West Seattle –a kind of left-liberal young professional families enclave—is a very Winnicottian place.  Of course, it is a store. But there is a room for nursing and changing a baby in peace and privacy.  And the saleswoman, who is a certified lactation consultant, is a fountain of good information and helpfulness. Such a place could not have existed until this generation of parents, internet-educated, inveterate researchers as they are, who come in with a plan. The saleswoman and Erin chatted frankly, like old girlfriends, about nipple sizes, types of pumps, breast soreness, the immunological benefits of breast milk. I was so impressed with both their good sense and knowledge and their freedom from awkwardness, much less shame or false modesty.

Walt let Erin know that she was taking too long to make a decision by screaming and wiggling furiously in my arms, unsoothable.  The saleswoman was unfazed and noted, correctly, that he has no trouble making his needs known.  So Erin went off and nursed him while I did all the buying business. As I did, I was remembering my mother –Walt’s greatgrandmother–telling me that when she was a young the pediatric wisdom of the day was that babies should not be fed “on demand” (as though it is demanding to be hungry!). They should be put on a bottle-feeding schedule, with one of the new “scientific” formulas, as soon as possible, and, similarly, they should be left to “cry it out” if they could not  keep to the schedule or drop right off to sleep when put into their cribs after feeding.  As Dr. Spock was in the United States, Winnicott  in the United Kingdom was a leader in arguing against these anti-breast-feeding, sleep dictating ideas, designed to manufacture a compliant baby with factory-like efficiency.

Many features of the child-manufacture regime originated from a New Zealand doctor and medical reformer named Truby King, whose celebrated programs were bestowed on Christine’s mother’s generation in New Zealand and then exported all around the Commonwealth and into the New World.  Sir Truby King, knighted by the British King and treated to a state funeral in New Zealand when he died in 1938 , has never been adequately criticized for the enormous harm he did to the Baby Boomers born just after the Second World War.  (Like so many of his generation, he was racist as well as childist,  spouting eugenic theories and deeply hostile to New Zealand’s Maori population.) This is a large topic, and I will return to it in my next post-loonacy post.

As I flew back to Toronto, so sad to be leaving Walt, whose very existence was such an excitement and a fascination, I kept marvelling at what good parents his parents are, so conscientious and careful and patient and loving, so ready to learn but also able to do what Winnicott advocated, trust their judgment and their understanding of their unique baby and his unique version of universal baby needs. The “good enough mother” and the “good enough father.”