Review by Janet Sayers, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, Kent University
British Journal of Social Work, Volume 34, Number 8, December 2004, pp. 1203-1205(3)
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.
