Deprivation and Delinquency

277 Pages·2011·1.83 MB·English

by  D. W. Winnicott

Deprivation and Delinquency

‘I warmly recommend this book to all those who would bring
dispassionate compassion to the task of understanding
and attempting to infl uence the predicament of those in
emotional distress.’
Herschel Prins, British Journal of Social Work
‘ Winnicott’s views are based on long experience and careful
observations. They are not an explanation of the causes of
delinquency, but they give valuable information on how depri-
vation can lead to antisocial behaviour . . . This collection of
papers, skilfully put together, contains useful guidance for
those who do residential or other work with children.’
Hugh J. Klare, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice

D. W.
Winnicott

Deprivation and Delinquency
Edited by Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and
Madeleine Davis
With a foreword by Jan Abram
First published 1984 by Tavistock Publications Ltd
First published 1990 by Routledge
First published in Routledge Classics 2012
b y Routledge
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© 1984, 2012 Clare Winnicott
Foreword © 2012 Jan Abram
T he right of D. W. Winnicott to be identifi ed as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and
explanation without intent to infringe.
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ISBN: 978-0-415-67373-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-80524-4 (ebk)
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
F OREWORD BY JAN ABRAM viii
EDITORS’ PREFACE xv
I NTRODUCTION BY CLARE WINNICOTT 1
PART I Children Under Stress: Wartime Experience 5
Editors’ Introduction 7
1 Evacuation of Small Children (1939/1940) 11
2 Review of The Cambridge Evacuation Survey (1941) 19
3 Children in the War (1940) 22
4 The Deprived Mother (1939) 27
5 The Evacuated Child (1945) 34
6 The Return of the Evacuated Child (1945) 39
7 Home Again (1945) 44
8 Residential Management as Treatment for Diffi cult
Children (1947) 49
9 Children’s Hostels in War and Peace (1948) 65
PART II The Nature and Origins of the Antisocial Tendency 69
Editors’ Introduction 71
10 Aggression and Its Roots (1939/1964) 73
11 The Development of the Capacity for Concern (1963) 86
12 The Absence of a Sense of Guilt (1966) 91
13 Some Psychological Aspects of Juvenile Delinquency (1946) 97
vi contents
14 The Antisocial Tendency (1956) 103
15 The Psychology of Separation (1958) 113
16 Aggression, Guilt and Reparation (1960) 116
17 Struggling Through the Doldrums (1963) 124
18 Youth Will Not Sleep (1964) 134
PART III The Social Provision 137
Editors’ Introduction 139
19 Correspondence with a Magistrate (1944) 141
20 The Foundation of Mental Health (1951) 145
21 The Deprived Child and How He Can Be Compensated
for Loss of Family Life (1950) 148
22 Group Infl uences and the Maladjusted Child: The
School Aspect (1955) 162
23 The Persecution that Wasn’t (1967) 172
24 Comments on the Report of the Committee on
Punishment in Prisons and Borstals (1961) 174
25 Do Progressive Schools Give Too Much Freedom to
the Child? (1965) 180
26 Residential Care as Therapy (1970) 190
PART IV Individual Therapy 197
Editors’ Introduction 199
27 Varieties of Psychotherapy (1961) 200
28 The Psychotherapy of Character Disorders (1963) 208
29 Dissociation Revealed in a Therapeutic Consultation (1965) 221
sources of the papers in this volume 245
notes 247
name index 250
subject index 251
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘The Psychotherapy of Character Disorders’ and ‘The Development of the
Capacity for Concern’ are reprinted from The Maturational Processes and the
Facilitating Environment by permission of Hogarth Press, London and International
Universities Press, New York. ‘The Antisocial Tendency’ is reprinted from
Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis by permission of Hogarth Press, London and
Basic Books, New York.
FOREWORD BY JAN ABRAM
‘A normal child, if he has confi dence in father and mother, pulls out all the
stops. In the course of time he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to
frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle, and to appropriate.’ (p. 99).
When Winnicott addressed magistrates in a talk he gave in 1946 entitled
‘Some psychological aspects of juvenile delinquency’ he wanted to convey
two interlinked concepts. The fi rst was that Freud’s concept of the uncon-
scious is essential to appreciate that the antisocial act conveys an important
message to society, a message that the juvenile delinquent is not consciously
aware of. The second was that the antisocial tendency is an important aspect
of normal emotional development. These psychoanalytic insights, Winnicott
urged, could help the magistrate acknowledge that, at one stage or another,
we have all felt deprived and may have been delinquent – even (or especially)
the mature adult who had become a magistrate. Therefore, an examination of
the delinquent’s unconscious motivations will resonate with an experience
that all of us know something about, i.e. a sense of loss that makes us feel
deprived. The question is whether this sense of deprivation is psychological
or real – inside or outside. For Winnicott the privileged child could feel as
deprived as the under-privileged child. What was key to the child’s develop-
ment was having ‘. . . confidence in father and mother . . .’.
This important collection – D eprivation and Delinquency – now rightly deemed a
classic, shows the genius of Winnicott’s thought and its relevance to the prob-
lems facing the world in these early years of the 21st century. Each article, as
with the whole of Winnicott’s oeuvre, is a testament to the power of psycho-
analytic understanding concerning the vast problem of human violence and
destruction – ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. Sigmund Freud’s development of
foreword ix
psychoanalysis as a new science at the turn of the 19th century stemmed
from his attempt to treat the hysteric whose symptoms offered evidence of a
divided mind – conscious and unconscious. The hysteric’s dramatic symp-
toms became understandable when the unconscious narrative – intense
oedipal sexual jealousy combined with murderous wishes – was brought to
light in the analytic setting. The ‘talking cure’ assisted the patient to bring to
consciousness forbidden repressed feelings. For more than a hundred years
now psychoanalysis has proved to be effective as a therapeutic treatment. As a
result there is a robust theory of psychoanalytic knowledge that offers an
account of the human mind and the complexities of human relationships. The
evolution of psychoanalytic theory is by no means complete and Winnicott’s
contribution is one particular strand of this knowledge.
Donald Winnicott’s passion for psychoanalysis began in 1919. For the last
nine months of World War I he had been in the position of a probationer-
surgeon on a destroyer who, often on his own, had to deal with the bloody
atrocities of sea combat. It was an experience he never fully recovered from.
As a traumatized young medical student of 23, he returned to complete his
medical degree at Cambridge University and was disconcerted that he could
not remember his dreams. The need to investigate this problem led Winnicott
to discover Freud’s fi rst major psychoanalytic publication – The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900). By 1923, now a consultant paediatrician, he approached
the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London with a view to starting a personal
analysis – the pre-requisite, then and now, to becoming a psychoanalyst. He
was referred to the younger brother of Lytton Strachey, James Strachey, who
had just returned from Vienna having undergone analysis himself with
Sigmund Freud. Winnicott would be in 5× weekly analysis with James
Strachey for the next ten years. He qualifi ed as a psychoanalyst in 1934 and a
year later became the fi rst man to qualify as a Child Analyst.
For over forty years Winnicott combined his psychoanalytic treatment of
adults and children with his work as a paediatrician – predominantly in
Paddington Green Hospital. It was this specifi c combination of psychoana-
lytic work – psychoanalysis proper and applied psychoanalysis – that led to
his revolutionary development of psychoanalysis as a theory and a thera-
peutic treatment. The hallmark of Winnicott’s extensions of Sigmund Freud’s
original formulations is his theory of emotional development that focuses on
the infant’s earliest experience of his parents – the parent– infant relationship.
The parent’s part of this relationship – the ‘environmental factors’ – contrib-
utes to the infant’s developing internal world. Enormous stress is laid on the
mother’s capacity to identify with her infant’s helplessness, which means that
she is able to adapt to the baby’s early needs. This specialized form of the
mother’s identifi cation Winnicott named ‘primary maternal preoccupation.’
The father’s role during this particular phase of the infant’s life is to allow and