Book Review of: Face to Face with Children: The Life and Work of Clare Winnicott

Reviewed by Christopher Reeves in J. of Child Psychotherapy, Vol .31 No. 1 April 2005 pp.137-40

Clare Winnicott is best remembered within the psychoanalytic world as the wife of her more renowned husband Donald, in her widowhood as a staunch, sometimes ruthless guardian of his legacy, and in her final years as a capable, if not especially original analyst. Latterly, with the publication first of Kahr’s (1996) monograph of Winnicott, and then of Rodman’s more recent and fuller biography (2003), interest has focussed on Clare’s role as her husband’s partner and in some sense the manager of his practical affairs.  Particular attention, some of it critical, has been directed at her early wartime involvement with Donald and at assessing her part in the breakdown of his first marriage.  An undoubted spur to this was the virtual suppression of information about his first wife in earlier accounts of Winnicott’s life and development, including notably her own, information that is now slowly beginning to emerge.  All of which has served to counterbalance the earlier idyllic, if somewhat colourless portrait of her as efficient but self-effacing, a foil to her more effervescent husband.

In spite of this recent re-evaluation of her role as Winnicott’s wife Clare herself has remained surprisingly elusive. Almost unknown even to those with more than a passing interest in her husband’s work is the fact that she was a significant figure in public life, a true pioneer of the social work profession, a notable lecturer and administrator, and perhaps most relevant of all, an important theorist of family casework and communication with children whose views carried great weight during the third quarter of the twentieth century.

This, therefore, is a timely book.  It seeks to portray Clare Winnicott as a figure in her own right.  In doing so it largely avoids gossip and conjecture about the personal dimension of her relationship with Winnicott before their marriage and about her interactions with the fractious Winnicott confraternity that survived him.  Instead it comprises a clear portrayal of Clare Winnicott’s early background and later professional career partly through her own writings and partly through the reminiscences of others. Bowlby’s biographer, Jeremy Holmes, contributes a thoughtful introduction.  This is followed by a biographical chapter by Kanter, a substantial piece, comprising a third of the book, and more in the nature of a short monograph.  After it comes a varied selection of Clare’s papers and lecture transcripts spanning her different personal and professional interests, as social work innovator, social policy adviser and psychoanalyst, and not least as her late husband’s memorialist.

The editor, Joel Kanter, is an American social work lecturer and psychotherapist.  He explains how he originally came upon some of her published articles on social work by chance and was immediately struck by their clarity and contemporary relevance.  This initial interest led to further researches into her background, history and writings, a labour of love spanning more than a decade, of which this is the fruit.  Aware as his researches progressed that Clare was the object of widely differing assessments from those who knew her, he has been at pains to compile as full and balanced an account as possible of her life and work.  In doing so he interviewed several friends and professional colleagues of Clare during the late 1990s, not a few of whom have since died.  His portrait is refreshingly free from partisanship, and whilst he seeks quite properly to draw Clare Winnicott out of her husband’s shadow, his final summing-up of what they each owed the other, and what each could intellectually own as theirs is admirably balanced.

Clare’s great strength as a person was as a facilitator of others, not least of her future husband, and her particular skill as a professional was as a communicator of complex ideas in accessible form.  A good example of the former is afforded by what happened when she and Winnicott first met.  A young, recently qualified social worker she had been instructed during 1941 to proceed to Oxford, initially for one day a week, where a ‘difficult doctor’ was consulting to the wartime evacuation programme.  She was told that he apparently didn’t believe in social work, preferring to do it all himself, and the situation was ‘in quite a mess’ as a result.  As for the staff of the evacuation hostels, on her arrival they complained that “He comes down and talks to the children. He plays his pipe to them and we like him very much, but he doesn’t ever tell us what to do.” (p.129).  Her solution to the situation confronting her was not directly to challenge Winnicott’s presumptions about the futility of social work but to demonstrate her indispensability by making good his practical deficiencies through her capacity for organising, liaising, and getting things done.  With the hostel staff she encouraged them to find the best way of using his therapeutic skills by encouraging them during his weekly visitations to explain to him what they were trying to do themselves with the children in their care, and asking for his comments, rather than simply providing him with the most problematic of them for him to see separately.  So successful was she in deploying the skills of Winnicott to best advantage and mobilising the natural talents of largely untrained care staff that by the end of the war the Oxfordshire evacuation scheme, to which she was now allocated full-time, had become a model not just for wartime emergency work but for the future profile of the child care services introduced through the 1948 Children Act. 

In effect, Clare Britton, as she was still known, became the pattern and prototype of the Children’s Officer, an innovatory category of childcare supremo, having statutory responsibilities for all the children in need of care and protection in each Local Authority area.  The new Children’s Officer was far from being simply an office-bound bureaucrat.  She was expected to be personally familiar with all the residential care establishments under her control, as well as knowing and known to every individual child in her care, to be in fact, and felt by them to be, in loco parentis.  Nowadays, in the aftermath of a series of child care disasters resulting from poor communication between multiple agencies, the concept of such a single overarching role, a single figure responsible for all ‘looked-after children,’ is once again in favour.  Yet whilst a reconstituted Children’s Officer in each Local Authority is increasingly viewed by Government as desirable, it is still felt to be somewhat unrealistic in practice.  It is interesting, therefore, to observe that when in December 1945 Clare and her future husband were invited to appear jointly before the government appointed Curtis Committee that was charged with devising a national plan for future child care services, she was questioned in detail about the viability and scope of the role she had developed for herself in Oxfordshire, and was able to justifiably claim to know the circumstances of every child for whose care she was ultimately responsible.  So, what Clare had demonstrated was feasible became the model of what ought to be done for the next twenty years of child care practice in Britain.

Looking back on this wartime and early post-war experience, Clare described her part in it quite modestly.  In a revealing talk given to the Squiggle Foundation towards the end of her life, fortunately recorded and reproduced in this collection for the first time, she described her role as ‘keeping it together’, whilst it was Winnicott himself, she said, ‘who made it work’ (p.269).  It is significant how often the phrases ‘keeping things together’ and ‘keeping in touch’ recur throughout this address.  It led me to reflect on how in reading her lectures one constantly comes across the metaphor of string and of things one can do constructively with a ball of string.  String almost seems to act as a leitmotiv, whether expressed in the guise of ‘linking people together’ (children in care and their absent parents), ‘staying connected’ as a social worker with a client across space and time, undoing organisational or procedural ‘tangles’ and ‘muddles’ (words she prefers to ‘mess’), or, in casework with children, emphasising the importance of collecting and connecting together the threads of a child’s memories of home and family. 

The metaphor also surfaces in the one strictly analytic paper in this collection, in fact the only one she ever had published in a psychoanalytic journal.  This was written to illustrate a clinical instance of what her late husband Donald had called ‘fear of breakdown’ (Winnicott, D.1974), that is, the breakdown consciously feared by the patient as cover for an unrecognised breakdown in infancy.  Clare’s emphasis is on the importance of joining up past and present experience and on the analyst’s role as the facilitator in this.  Clearly, there are echoes (unacknowledged) of Bion here, but the stress on experiential linking (as opposed to the linking of thought and feeling) is distinctively her own.

Perhaps the most interesting example of the underlying string metaphor, however, occurs in an edited extract from a lecture she gave to a group of psychotherapists in 1981 entitled “I Had to Fail” and quoted by Kanter (p.83) towards the end of his biographical essay.  After describing the patient’s need to render the analyst helpless and futile, the passage in question begins with the words ‘I felt as if she could easily slip away from me at that moment’.  The image is of someone in imminent danger holding on at the end of a lifeline, but losing consciousness or the will to live, with the analyst as the would-be rescuer unable to help.  The point that Clare Winnicott goes on to make in connection with this patient’s predicament is that ‘rescue’ does not involve the therapist in, as it were, pulling harder on the line, but in confronting the reasons for her own sense of impotence: just who is she attempting to save – the patient? or herself?  Separating out and addressing her own fear of failing the patient was here the necessary condition of the patient herself eventually discovering her own will to live.

In a brief but memorable essay (Winnicott, D. 1960) Donald wrote about the antithetic symbolism of string.  It seems as if the significance of this percolated deep into Clare’s own thoughts and consciousness of the therapeutic role.  String both binds together and exposes the separateness of the objects to be bound.  Likewise, what is ‘strung together’ has also at some stage to be unloosed. (One thinks for instance of the severing of the umbilical cord as the condition of the baby’s ex utero existence).  Both in her social work teaching and later as analyst Clare was constantly reflecting on the tensions between connectedness and separation, whether over the boundaries of the personal and professional in caregiving, over mutuality and difference in relationships, empathy and tact in regard to sharing the traumas and conflicts of clients as a caseworker, indeed about the whole matter of the interface between inner and outer worlds.  Although this provided a constant, unifying theme for her work, it nevertheless does not seem to have presented her with the same degree of personal struggle to sort out as afflicted her husband.  Unlike him she does not appear to have felt the need to emancipate herself painfully from a compelling, but oppressive, discipleship in order to find her true identity – at least not after she reached early adulthood and had begun to embark on a professional career.  Perhaps it was this combination of sensitivity, sureness and integrity in her that so appealed to Winnicott at their first encounter.  Although she sought analysis from Melanie Klein, and was prepared to use her husband’s (reluctant?) services in securing it, she did so, she says, because she saw and respected Klein as ‘tough’ rather than idolised her as all-seeing.  And she never became an acolyte of hers.

Clare Winnicott comes across through the pages of this book as an attractive, rounded individual, tough when necessary, but for the most part tender.  Yet there is more than a tinge of melancholy in the story of her life.  1945 with the setting up of the Curtis Committee must have seemed like ‘ a very dawn’ in British social work, and Clare Britton was up with the larks to welcome it.  Caring for the needs of children without families seemed not just an obligation on society in the immediate post-war era, but a privilege for society to discharge on children’s behalf.  The need, not the cost, was the primary concern and there was a readiness on the part of government to heed and be influenced by experienced professionals such as Bowlby, Winnicott, Susan Isaacs and Clare Britton on the best ways to achieve it.

Twenty years later other counsels prevailed.  Social work professionalised, the era of the ‘generic’ social worker set in, casework skills were increasingly discounted in favour of direct action and client empowerment.  Clare Winnicott was confronted with, even in part presided over some of these changes.  Nevertheless, she sorely lamented the passing of the personal yet professional casework concept, and no doubt this partly contributed to her retreat from social work into the more settled confines of the psychoanalytic profession during the last decade of her life.

Since her death twenty years ago, further changes have overtaken the profession, organisation and even the very concept of social work.  Never one to seek to ‘ring the bell backwards’ -to quote a line from her favourite poem, The Four Quartets (Eliot 1944) – Clare Winnicott would doubtless have remained sanguine that eventually the abiding values she discerned and proclaimed in social work would one day reassert themselves, as a society sanctioned yet very human form of caring for one’s fellows.  What perplexed her, I think, is that in later years many of her colleagues in social work administration and teaching, whilst proclaiming a similar commitment, did not share her perspective on how it should be achieved.  Perhaps this was because for her the principles of collaboration and collegiality with the client were axiomatic. It disconcerted her to find others in positions of authority and influence, for whom the proper frameworks within which to view the provision and allocation of care resources within and towards society were those of contract, consumption and competition.

Donald Winnicott disliked competitiveness in caring also, a factor that no doubt contributed to his abiding preference for ‘himself being the whole team’ (Winnicott, D. 1970) even after his earlier suspicions about the efficacy of social workers had been dispelled through contact with Clare.  She taught him that sharing with colleagues did not mean loss of professional identity, and the range and reach of his work gained immeasurably in consequence.  There may be a wider lesson here. Perhaps for child psychotherapists the real value of this book, apart from its historical interest, lies in the way it shows that insights into the unconscious workings of individuals can be productively communicated across professional boundaries, and that in a non-threatening way.  Above all, her ease in joining together inner experience and outer distress, the terrors of the child and the practicalities of managing them, provides a model from which to learn.

With the eclipse of clinic-based or inter-agency teamwork, and where communication rather than active collaboration between professionals is viewed as the primary imperative, child psychotherapists today are often obliged to become the family caseworker, or the de facto counsellor of the careworker when treating a looked after child in therapy.  It’s not a question of psychotherapists ‘not believing in teams’ so much as not always having teams to believe in.  Clare Winnicott’s reflections on casework may prove particularly enlightening for those who find themselves in such a situation.  And the three chapters devoted to communicating with children are, to my mind, as good an introduction to the subject as any for those providing support or tuition to counsellors of young people.  I thoroughly recommend this book.

Christopher Reeves

Gorseacre, West Polberro, St. Agnes Cornwall TR5 0ST

References

Eliot, T.S. (1944) ‘Little Gidding’ The Four Quartets line 181 London: Faber and Faber.

KAHR, B.(1996) D.W.Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait London: Karnac.

RODMAN, F.R.(2003) Winnicott: Life and Work Cambridge M.A.: Perseus Publishing.

WINNICOTT, D.W.(1960)‘String: a technique of communication’ Journal

of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 1:49-52.

WINNICOTT, D.W.(1970)Letter to Robert Tod. In RODMAN,F.R(ed.) 

The Spontaneous Gesture: Selected letters of D.W. Winnicott Cambridge

M.A.: Harvard Univ. Press.

WINNICOTT, D.W. (1974)‘Fear of breakdown’ International Review of

Psycho-analysis 1:103-107.