Review by Sue Kegerreis, Psychodynamic Practice, August 2005

This volume pulls together and reissues most of Clare Winnicott’s papers, and also includes a biographical chapter that describes her life and legacy.  Clare Winnicott’s standing has suffered as a result of her being primarily known as DWWinnicott’s wife, which has perhaps prevented her from being given sufficient attention in her own right.  This book goes a long way to redress this, and also casts a fascinating light into DWW’s own development and influences. I confess to reading it with two conflicting areas of interest- on the one hand Clare Winnicott’s own compelling contributions and on the other a slightly guilty detective-like urge to trace the couple’s influence on each other and to get more insight into DWW’s life and work.  It is not possible, however one might wish to, to read this without having DWW very much in mind.  And perhaps Clare herself would not wish one to, as it is clear from reading her own papers that she both contributed to his ideas and brought them to life for herself in her work. 

The biographical chapter does a good job of summarising Clare Winnicott’s story and contribution, telling us of her early life, her social work career, her marriage, her teaching, her analytic training and work (including of course her analysis with Mrs Klein, of whose technique she remained critical all her life) and her influence on a whole generation of social workers.  It places her work in both historical and theoretical contact and usefully summarises some of her key contributions.     Unfortunately this chapter suffers from a number of editing problems.  

While this biographical introduction is certainly worth reading, the meat of the book is in the papers for social workers republished here, which demonstrate in a most eloquent and accessible fashion her way of approaching work with children.  She does not use jargon, or employ any esoteric concepts, to the extent that what she writes could maybe have been underestimated as it reads so much like common sense. 

Yet there is much of great value here.  She writes of a kind of social work that has largely been lost to us, and this can lead to an angry nostalgia in the reader.  One feels great regret for the time when social work included this kind of emotional case-work and therapeutic intervention.  How one wishes that social workers were more encouraged and facilitated in spending time to work with their clients in the way she describes, where they can be truly alongside the child over long periods of time, through great upheavals in their care, sharing experiences and living through their crises with them.   

Much of her writing is geared to helping social workers manage their complex task of being in touch with children’s inner worlds while still operating chiefly in the realm of their external worlds.  As she says, ‘The social worker …starts off as a real person concerned with the external events and people in the child’s life.  In the course of her work with him she will attempt to bridge the gap between the external world and his feelings about it, and in so doing she will enter his inner world too.  As a person who can move from one world to another, the social  worker can have a special value all her own for the child and a special kind of relationship to him which is quite different in kind from the value and relationship that a psychotherapist has.’ 

Although there are extracts in this book about Clare Winnicott’s psychoanalytic work, this is not a book that has much to say directly about counselling itself, but nonetheless much of what she says could help counsellors in their work with children, as she is so in touch with children’s emotional lives and with the ways in which adults can help or hinder the children staying in touch with themselves.  

Over and over she stresses this most important point – that it is in staying real, staying in touch with their own emotions, that the children can attain and maintain mental health, even in the face of terrible trauma and loss.  ‘By keeping children alive I am of course referring to maintaining their capacity to feel.  If there are no feelings there is no life, there is merely existence.  All children who come our way have been through painful experiences of one kind or another, and this has led many of them to clamp down on feelings and others of them to feel angry and hostile, because this is more tolerable than to feel loss and isolation’ (p187).   Adults, whatever their role, can be crucial in encouraging or preventing this loss of feeling and thence meaning. ‘The greatest reassurance we can give to children is the feeling that they are understood and accepted, right down to the painful sad bit in the middle.  If we do not deny this painful bit of themselves, they need not do so, and their natural resilience can then taken them on into life again’ ( p201).  This is as relevant for counsellors as it is for social workers.  There is a stark warning here too, which we all need to attend to: ‘In these situations there is a strong temptation to seduce children away from the reality of their feelings and to offer distractions of one kind or another.  If we do this we lead them up a blind alley from which they may never return’ (p 201). 

It is clear from her writing that, however much she knew about the internal factors that could contribute to and exacerbate emotional difficulty, her emphasis was always on the environment.  Her greatest contributions to the children she helped, both directly and through the practice she encouraged in her students, was in the realm of facilitating the provision of better care and helping the children in their transitions.  Whether through helping care staff become more emotionally aware and responsive, or through her work with parents and foster-carers, she put a great emphasis on improving actual emotional care, rather than on ‘curing’ the child.  She has a clear and uncomplicated view of the influence of environmental failure on the child, while never losing sight of the fact that it is the way the child processes this failure, and crucially how he is helped to process it by those around them, that has a key role in whether health or illness develops.  

There are chapters in this book that have particular relevance for those in residential work, as she writes movingly about the work with troubled evacuees during the war. She powerfully evokes the difficulty and lack of miracles in the work, but still conveys a remarkable ability to be resilient and consistently thoughtful about some very difficult children.  She also shows how her pragmatic strategies to make the most of DWW’s consultation to the children’s home staff came from a deep instinctive understanding that success with challenging children does not come from knowing clever answers, but from expanding one’s capacity to observe, process, understand and simply bear what they bring. 

Later papers have important messages about the selection and training of workers, and the need for self-awareness to be developed in anyone coping with the emotional demands of working with difficult children.  There is a more personal memoir from a talk at the Squiggle Foundation about DWW, which makes moving reading and gives one a glimpse into his mind and manner that is immediate and very alive.  Less felicitous is the section when the discussion after this is transcribed, as the questions are not always well put, or seem ill-conceived.  We get a glimpse into how she responded to views about DWW with which she disagreed, but this section raised doubts as to whether it really belongs in print. 

To sum up, this is a book that is easy to read, full of usable quotations on communication with children and redolent of a consistent thoughtfulness that one can only aspire to.  It would be of most use to those who work on the interface of children’s inner and outer worlds, such as social workers, care staff and pastoral teacher, but would still be well worth reading for counsellors.