Constructing and Addressing the 'Ordinary Devoted Mother (original) (raw)

2014, History Workshop Journal

Donald Winnicott's 50 BBC radio talks, broadcast between 1943-62, constitute the heart of his oeuvre and were later published in the bestselling book, 'The Child, the Family and the Outside World'. This article argues that, although commentators have routinely alluded to the broadcast origins of these talks, the importance of their institutional context is commonly effaced, as a result dehistoricising them. The article seeks to recover the conditions of production of the talks as 'spoken word', emphasising Winnicott's formidable linguistic skills, his understanding of register and his sensitivity to listeners, qualities developed under the formative influence of Winnicott's two producers, Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie. Contemporary attempts by the BBC to popularise psychoanalysis met with significant resistance and criticism within the Corporation but Winnicott avoided such controversy, it is argued here, because of the way he was positioned within the BBC, and the role he played in wartime British society. The article places Winnicott among other popularisers of psychoanalytic ideas at the time, such as Susan Isaacs, John Bowlby and Ruth Thomas, and contends that, while Winnicott's idealisation of motherhood has been rightly criticised, his broadcasts also conveyed a powerful sense of motherhood as a lived experience. *** Between 1943 and 1962, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott gave more than 50 broadcasts on BBC Radio. 2 Mostly taking the form of scripted talks, the broadcasts covered a wide range of subjects-from guilt and jealousy to evacuation and step-parents. Many (though not all) were subsequently published as pamphlets, and later formed the basis of a bestselling book-'The Child, the Family and the Outside World', first published by Penguin in 1964, and two other volumes, 'Talking to Parents' and 'Winnicott on the Child'. 3 For most non-clinicians or general readers these books 4 are their port of entry into Winnicott, and constitute the heart of his oeuvre. Both historians of psychoanalysis and biographers of Winnicott routinely acknowledge their genesis as broadcasts, but mostly in a manner as to suggest that this was