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. Read more

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.

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As we spent the long Easter weekend together at his home in Greenport, Long Island, in April, 2011, Jerome Kohn and I had leisure to return several times to talking about our friend Lotte Kohler, who had died on March 24^th in New York, at the age of 91. Each time, we registered an “end of an era” feeling. A world, organized around Hannah Arendt and her friends and their legacies, had lost its last member, and the one who had become, after the death of Arendt’s literary executor, Mary McCarthy, the chief literary preserver and the reservoir of stories. After she had finished the compiling the Arendt-Jaspers and the Arendt-Bluecher correspondences, Lotte had handed on to Jerry, across a generational difference, the role of the executor and “the editor.” But she had remained at her guard station, watching over the next generation: Jerry edited volume after volume of Hannah Arendt’s posthumous papers, and I brought out a second edition of my 1982 biography of Arendt and a little book to celebrate her centenary, Why Arendt Matters. But now our guardian Lotte is gone.

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Every once in a while, a psychological process that is having enormous influence in our national political life is noted in the newspaper, explicitly, and even given the proper name.  This morning, Friday the 13^th of May, that happened in a New York Times editorial entitled “Mitt Romney in a Time Warp.”  The moment of illumination was brief, however, and by the second half of the editorial darkness had descended.

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On Thursday, I phoned Kate Swift from Middletown, Connecticut, where I taught at Wesleyan University for almost twenty years, from 1975 until 1993. It was during those years that I had come to know Kate and her partner Casey Miller, who were great heroines of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Everyone knew their article “One Small Step for Genkind,” which had appeared in the New York Times Magazine, 1972. It had sent out into the world a completely revolutionary idea: we could stop using the pronoun “he” for all people, male and female; we could stop referring unthinkingly to “mankind,” leaving half the human species, half of genkind, unacknowledged. We could become aware of how deeply and thoroughly our way of speaking –our vocabulary—shapes our ways of thinking and acting. A few years later, when Kate Swift and Casey Miller were the leaders of an emergent language-consciousness movement within the Movement, women everywhere could immediately identify “sexist language.”

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