Review by Celia Downes, British Journal of Psychotherapy, Spring, 2006, Vol. 22(3)
Clare Winnicott had a seemingly inexhaustible fund of stories; here is the story of how she and Donald first met. In 1941,
during the Second World War, Clare Britton, aged 35, had recently completed the psychodynamically based Mental Health Course
for social workers at the London School of Economics and was working in the Midlands for the Regional Health Authority. Donald
Winnicott was making weekly visits as consultant psychiatrist to five hostels set up in Oxfordshire to house young evacuees
who were too disturbed to be billeted out into private homes. Clare recalls her briefing from her boss: ‘There’s
a difficult doctor working in that area. He comes down once a week. He doesn’t believe in social work, because he likes
to do it all himself. But it’s really in quite a mess, and you must go and straighten the whole thing up’ (pp.
128—9).
Clare’s approach to the task is a model for psychotherapists working as community based consultants. The staff were
frustrated that Dr Winnicott was not telling them what to do. Clare suggested: ‘Well, let’s never ask him what
to do. Let’s do the best we can in the present situation, and then, when he comes again, tell him what we did and see
if he’s got any comments to make on it and if we can therefore learn something from what we did’ (p. 129). Not
content with enabling both the hostel staff and Winnicott to form an effective working relationship with each other at one
remove from the children, Clare saw there was more to be done to shift Dr Winnicott into a more appropriate and effective
position: ‘One thing I did waito stop him eating all the children’s rations in one meal! The staff were inclined
to save all the best food for him, and I just slipped in one day, "I suppose you know you’re eating the children’s
butter ration for a week?" He was absolutely horrified!’ (p. 129). Donald was to tell her later: ‘You gave me
a role and turned the job into a professional job’ (p. 129), and, as their personal relationship developed, he wrote
to dare: ‘Your effect on me is to make me keen and productive and this is all the more awful — because when I
am cut off from you I feel paralysed for all action and originality’ (p. 252). In his Foreword, Brett Kahr points to
some empirical evidence for this; during the 25 years of his first marriage Donald published only one book, whereas during
his 19-year marriage to dare his writing was prodigious.
Clare Winnicott spent the last decade of her life editing and disseminating her husband’s professional legacy. So
perhaps it is understandable that she is known to many psychotherapists only as Donald Winnicott’s second wife, and
that her own distinguished career as a social worker, social work teacher, as Director of Child Care Studies at the Home Office
and as a psychoanalyst has been overshadowed by an idealized husband. Clare Winnicott’s published works, spanning a
period of 40 years, have been brought together with an interview she gave shortly before her death in 1984 through a substantial
and well-researched biographical essay in which Kanter draws on interviews with colleagues, students, friends and family members.
Throughout the book Clare’s vibrant, mischievous, charismatic personality emerges.
Clare and Donald’s creative professional partnership, working with evacuees and other children cared for by local
authorities under war-time conditions was to have a profound influence on their thinking and both their sub~equent careers.
il-avelling between hostels they would try to formulate what was going on, theories would be developed, discarded or modified.
Thirty-six years later, looking back on their relationship, long after their marriage in 1951, dare was to comment: ‘We
played with ideas, tossing them about at random, with the freedom of knowing that we need not agree, and that we were strong
enough not to be hurt by each other’ (p. 250). Donald’s understanding of the delinquent act as an unconcious effort
to deal with loss, and the need for children to have a period of special adaptation if they are to recover from trauma, developed
during this period.
For Clarc the work in Oxfordshire, both directly with evacuated children and with their parents, formed the basis for her
teaching career with the Child Care course she started and ran at the LSE and with the later Applied Social Studies course
there. Donald also lectured on both these courses, continuing their professional partnership. I remember him starting his
first lecture with a discourse on why the particular lecture theatre we were in was unsuitable for his course as it was ‘square’;
we needed a ‘round’ room. We had been introduced to the concept of ‘holding’ and the following week
the room was changed. As one of the many social work students fortunate to be taught by both dare and Donald at LSE, and like
the social workers and psychotherapists interviewed by Kanter in the course of his research, reading this book brought home
to me the extent to which my subsequent career has been profoundly and extensively influenced not only by Donald but by Clare.
She taught out of her own experience formulated with a strong theoretical basis and a complete absence of jargon, so that
we came away from seminars having absorbed memorable stories that continued to illumi_nate and nurture our practice.
Clare qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1960. Perhaps one reason she continued to move successfully between the worlds of
social work and psychoanalysis was because of her clarity about the differences between psychodynamic casework with children
and child psychotherapy. Like Donald Winnicott, Clare understood that the primary need of a young child is not for a casework
relationship but for an environment where he can be cared for successfully. So, in contrast to the psychotherapist, the child
care social worker starts off as a real person concerned with external events and with the power to change the child’s
environment. Subsequently much work has to be done with the child, working backwards to events in which the social worker
has been the person at the centre of a drama, involved in the child leaving home or moving from foster parents. It is by this
means that the social worker aims to bridge the gap between the external world and a child’s feelings about himself,
his parents and other significant people, including the social worker, eventually enabling the child to reach the suffering
which is his vital tip, his growing point.
Clare also emphasized the importance of the child’s internal relationship with ‘lost’ parent figures
and the need to keep these alive. For the social worker this involved seeking out parents wherever possible, and in those
days before access visits and case conferences involving the whole family, often being the only integrating factor for the
separated child.
Clare delighted in the way in which some of her ideas and practice, developed in a social work context in close conjunction
with Donald, challenged psychoanalytic theory about the essential nature of the therapeutic process. There were times when
being the wife of Donald Winnicott must have been difficult. Clare always insisted that the choice of Melanie Klein as her
second analyst and subsequent training analyst was her own idea, not Donald’s. Clare had a profound respect for many
of Klein’s theories, though she was critical of Klein’s disregard of environmental factors and was also troubled
by aspects of Klein’s clinical technique, which she considered was unnecessarily impersonal, lacked civility and focused
only on negative aspects of the transference. When Clare eventually walked out of a session it was Donald who mediated. Klein
commented to Donald: ‘She’s too aggressive to analyse’ (p. 39). Donald told Clare: ‘I can never see
the end of your analysis with Melanie’ (p. 38), ‘You’ll kill Melanie or she’ll kill you’ (p.
38). It is not clear how far the complex relationship between Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein fed into this stormy relationship.
Nor is it clear how far being seen as Donald’s wife exacerbated the apparent ignorance in some analytic circles of Clare’s
outstanding social work career. When she delayed starting an analytic practice on qualifying, Hanna Segal understood this
as a wish to avoid conflict with Donald, apparently taking no account of Clare’s social work teaching career and national
role in developing child care social work for which she was awarded the OBE in 1971, just before Donald died.
The loss of Donald coincided with the end of Clare’s term of office at the Home Office. She returned to LSE to run
the Applied Social Studies course, probably expecting a home-coming and ill prepared for a divided staff and a rebellious
student body as psychodynamic casework was ousted in favour of community work. Clare appears to have had little patience for
student dissent, and after a year she left. It was at this point, at the age of 66, that Clare started her private practice
as a psychoanalyst.
In spite of melanoma, diagnosed two years later, she continued to practise until shortly before her death at the age of
78, having become a training analyst for both psychoanalytic psychotherapists and for child psychotherapists at the Tavistock
Clinic. Clearly she was well thought of, but it would have been hard to match the outstanding contribution she had made to
social work, which she now felt was being swept away. Jock Sutherland wished that Clare had become less involved with analysis
and become more of a crusader for psychodynamic social casework; while one can sympathize with this view, probably no one
could have stemmed the tide that did much to marginalize it, least of all Clare grieving for Donald.
Although she had relinquished most of her organizational roles, social work remained important to Clare and she did much
to support individual social workers. While working as social workers at the Tavistock Clinic a colleague and I designed a
course for social workers on Direct Work with Children. During its development Clare was consulted and was mischievously delighted
that this was a course on work with children based at the Tavistock Clinic, being taught by social workers rather than psychotherapists.
Consistent with her initial role of boundary-keeper for Donald when they first met in Oxfordshire, Clare consciously provided
a ‘holding environment’ for Donald who could be chaotic and frequently overstretched himself professionally. Clare
insisted on being there to provide a 7.00 pm dinner during the week. At weekends she had to fight for time to themselves,
insist_ing that Donald’s weekly Sunday morning meetings with Masud Khan finished by 12 noon. In her obituary Milner
(1985) recalled: ‘It has been said that it was only through [Clare] that Donald survived the constant overspending of
himself as long as he did’ (p. 4).
Perhaps they are best remembered as a couple who sparked each other off, as Kanter puts it:
"Donald became part of Clare’s world in social work while Clare became part of Donald’s world in psychoanalysis;
in doing so, both enriched their respective professional domains. No similar collaboration between leaders in these professions
has occurred since the inception of these professions." (p. 70)
Celia Downes
Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling (WPF) Forum for Independent Psychotherapists, London
Reference
Milner, M. (1985). Obituary: Clare Winnicott. Winnicott Studies 1(1): 4.
