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“Plea for a safe place” is the title that immediately came to my mind for this brief comment on the third volume of Winnicott's Collected Works. Reading the book carefully, line by line, I realized its extraordinary unity. As a musical motif, the main theme appears and disappears in the texts written for various occasions: an essay to be published, a speech at a conference, a letter to a newspaper or a colleague, and so on. As in a symphonic score, this allows for an endless series of variations on the same motif, but each time it also seems new and surprising. It is as if Winnicott is concerned solely with the one thing he thinks is important, to the point of becoming obsessed with it. Whether he talks about antisocial children, real criminals, the trauma of birth, or hatred in the countertransference, the central point is always the home (“good environment” / “primary home experiences” / “child's own home” / “good start”) in which the psyche is born, what jeopardizes it, and what can be done when the damage has already been wrought.
It is necessary to bear in mind the social and historical context of these writings, which span the years 1946 to 1951, and thus date back to the period immediately following the Second World War. War often appears, page after page, not only as a memory of recent dramatic experiences but also as a negative figure (the “broken home” / “war situation” / “wartime” / “evacuation breakdown” / “unsettled homes”) of the safe place. This is why, as a possible allegory of the lack of “safe place,” Henry Moore's drawings exhibited at the Tate Gallery a few years ago