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Listen to thisFace to Face with Children: The life and work of Clare Winnicott, Joel Kanter (ed.), London, Karnac, 2004.
Clare Winnicott (née Britton) was a lead trainer of social workers in the 20th century. Her work connected to childcare and social work shed important light on every aspect of interacting with vulnerable others. This book is a breath of fresh air in a world of regulation and control.
Half the content comprises Kanter’s excellent overview of Clare’s life, using excerpts from her output and interviews with friends, relatives and former colleagues. The rest of the book comprises reprints of a selection of Clare’s articles, conference presentations and letters. These cover her work with evacuees in Oxfordshire and then move on to specific ideas from her work, such as the rescue motive and the development of insight and self-awareness.
Finally, we find her writings about Donald. These focused, personal disclosures have the unexpected effect of “normalising” Donald and amplifying Clare. The two were in fact equal partners, neither able to operate so well if the other were missing. They “played” together as adults and provided holding for each other, such that both of their fields of work benefited.
Clare loathed administration and hated conflict, claiming she was most free to function at her best when given a bit of elbow room. She was “greatly troubled” by many aspects of Klein's analytic technique and once walked out on her. She explained her absence from bed shortly before she died saying: “I have been to a party; it is such a waste of one's life spending it in bed; isn’t it?
Kanter’s book is a fitting tribute to the influence Clare had on British childcare policy in the 1950s and 60s. My overriding impression is of the relevance of her work today. In most places you can mentally substitute “counsellor” for “social worker” and feel the resonance as she speaks about the holding environment and the need to contain.
The book will be of interest to anyone involved in children's work or related helping relationships: teachers, counsellors working with parents and caregivers, and social workers frustrated with bureaucracy and into dynamic psychology. Perhaps even Donald Winnicott fans!
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2. Review by Janet Sayers, Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, Kent University, Canterbury, and author of Mothers of Psychoanalysis: Helen Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein, and Boy Crazy: Remembering Adolescence, Therapies and Dreams. In British Journal of Social Work, December 2004
Clare Winnicott (1906-1984) is a major figure in British social work. She contributed to post-war child care policy on the basis of her work, from 1941, with children evacuated to Oxfordshire during the war. She headed the London School of Economics” child care course from its inception in 1947, and taught on its subsequent generic applied social studies course. In 1964, she became Director of Child Care Studies at the Home Office for which, in 1971, she was awarded a CBE. All this and much more is recounted by US-based social worker, Joel Kanter in his useful introduction to this book of her collected papers.
Particularly useful is his account of her illuminating insights about direct work with children. He emphasises, for instance, her notion of the social worker as “transitional participant” (p.74) – the person who, she said, gives children “continuity throughout the changes to which they are subjected” and a sense of someone able “to gather together the separate threads of the child's life” (p.75). Perhaps this inspired Donald Winnicott (whom she married in 1951). Certain he likened psychoanalysis to early mothering bringing together the infant’s earliest “unintegration” such that, as he put it, “a baby does not mind whether he is many bits or one whole being ... provided that from time to time he comes together and feels something” (Winnicott 1945: 150).
The same year, 1945, Clare wrote of similar factors enabling children to bear unintegration, at least as this surfaces in playing. Playing, she argued, depends on children feeling loved and having their love accepted. It proves to them their “goodness and loveableness”, and hence gives them the courage needed to face, work out, and bring together their “inner needs and conflicts” with outer reality in play (p.114). In 1950 she also emphasised the crucial importance of children's “first treasured possession” (p.22) and of social workers respecting children bringing into care just such playthings, their “favourite but filthy teddy-bears and other possessions ... from the past” (p.65). Clare thus anticipated her husband's famous 1951 notion of transitional objects bridging the gap between the child's inner and outer worlds. He also acknowledged, it seems, that she influenced his concept of “holding”. She put it in terms of social workers holding in mind details of the child's life so that, to use her words, “when he sees us, he can find that bit of himself which he has given us”. Social workers, she added, also hold and tolerate the situation bringing the child into care “until he either finds a way through it or tolerates it himself” (p.151).
Paradoxically, however, one of the major insights Kanter notes in celebrating Clare’s direct work with children involved advocating working not face to face but indirectly with them, at least initially, through the “shared experience” of a “neutral area” such as “walks, car rides, playing, drawing, listening to something, looking at something or talking about something” (p.189). This gives them the safety of separateness in togetherness which is often needed before more direct communication can begin.
Given Kanter’s emphasis on Clare’s insight regarding shared experience, it is fitting that he ends his book with her reminiscences about her husband's shared experiences as a child, and with her own shared experience with an adult woman client. This enabled the latter to recover the memory of the traumatic childhood separation causing her, as it causes many children in care, to want to do everything for herself. To this Clare pointed out, “Well, one thing that you can’t do is to be the other person” (p.286). An odd way of putting it, but true. Filled with this and other telling observations this book is highly relevant to all those concerned to advance direct social work with both children and adults which is nowadays often impeded by social services managerialism.
Reference
Winnicott, D.W. (1945) Primitive emotional
development, Collected Papers, London: Tavistock, 1958, pp.145-56
