Home Is Where We Start From

"He was one of the most accomplished interpreters of Freud in England. And what is interesting is that he makes psychoanalysis very English, if you like. He takes a body of knowledge that can be very abstract and pretentious at times, and turns it into something much more suited to the English character. By that I mean that he spoke in plain language. He was also eccentric and he had a sense of humour, which we associate with literature in this country. He was also humane. He worked with children and their mothers and fathers, and he was very aware that life is difficult – and that we are all slightly crazy. Rather than humiliating us and making us feel that certain thoughts are perverted, as some psychoanalysts did, he was generous about it. Winnicott also came up with the idea of the “good enough mother”. Other psychoanalysts often demanded that the mother be everything, or else the child would be harmed. But Winnicott allowed a greater amount of error for both the mother and father. For anyone who has a family of their own it’s a nice deprecatory starting point. Definitely. A lot of his writing involved picking up the broken pieces after the Second World War, when children had endured complicated family arrangements – whether the father was away, or killed, or the children sent to the countryside. He found a ready audience in his ideas about imperfection, and about accepting imperfection while still trying to get better. When I think about the essayists that I like, I realise I have a very low tolerance for complicated writing. There is almost nothing in the humanities that can’t be expressed simply, even if it’s a complicated idea. It’s not rocket science, so the onus is on the writer to provide a charming reading experience. Partly for literary reasons – I like the way he writes and I like his personality. He is the sort of person I would like to be friends with, which I don’t feel about either Anna or Sigmund Freud. While a lot of what he says is Freudian, I prefer the nuances and the ordinariness that he holds on to while discussing pretty weird stuff."