Letter From Joel Kanter, London Review of Books, April 1, 2004

Frank Kermode notes that Robert Rodman may have overlooked the details of a romantic involvement that Clare, Donald Winnicott's second wife, may have had in the years before they married. A far more important omission, however, is Rodman's neglect of the professional collaboration between Clare and Donald. Clare Britton began her career in social work in 1941 with troubled evacuees in an Oxfordshire hostel. Donald was the consulting physician and Clare was assigned to help the untrained hostel staff make use of this brilliant, eccentric psychoanalyst.

Their collaboration produced two co-authored articles as well as the personal relationship which Rodman describes in considerable detail. Both went on to give testimony to the Curtis Committee, which in turn led to the formation of Children's Services throughout the UK. Until Winnicott's death in 1971, they continued to teach together at the London School of Economics and became the only people awarded honorary membership by the Association of Child Care Officers. Clare, incidentally, underwent a stormy analysis with Melanie Klein.

Undoubtedly, this collaboration had a major impact on Winnicott's work and thinking. After the war, he largely abandoned the practice of child analysis, instead transforming his Oxfordshire experience into a model of therapeutic consultation. He was certainly aware of Clare's creative use of transitional objects (which she simply referred to as 'first treasured possessions') with the evacuated children and he directly acknowledged his debt to her for the term 'holding' which, as Kermode notes, was one of the cornerstones of his theory.

Joel Kanter
Silver Spring, Maryland