Primary Maternal Preoccupation: D. W. Winnicott and Social Democracy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971) was an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst whose ideas were part of the ethical and practical thinking that informed the British welfare state’s provision of need through its clinics, hospitals, welfare centers, schools, and homes from the 1930s to the 1950s. Winnicott has a distinguished if controversial reputation as one of the few British psychoanalysts to make an original contribution to his discipline. His ideas about mothers and infants, transitional objects, true and false selves entered the national psyche through the forties and fifties, yet a social history of his thought, which pays attention to its sources and its impact on the institutions and ethos of British social democracy in the mid-twentieth century, has only just begun. As Peter Barham, historian of Britain’s shell-shocked military, has remarked, history learns from psychoanalysis and then forgets what it learned, as if unconscious—the deep and hidden parts of our selves— mental lives of ordinary people are inaccessible or difficult to bear in mind when writing historical narrative.2 British historians tend to believe that human nature either resists historical events or is shaped by them; as if a concern with the unconscious is at odds with history’s emphasis on real events in time and place.3 Yet Winnicott’s studies of mother-infant relationships dating from his clinical work in London hospitals from the mid-1920s show how closely the two dimensions of inner feeling and external world are linked.