Responses to “The First Mrs Winnicott and the Second Mrs Winnicott: Does Psychoanalysis Facilitate Healthy Marital Choice?” by Brett Kahr: “Of the Nature of a Therapeutic Act”

Brett Kahr continues to spoil us. While the primary focus of his article is the intriguing question of whether psychoanalysis made a difference in Winnicott's second marital choice, along the way he opens his treasure chest of Winnicottiana and distributes some of its jewels. His is, indeed, a valuable trove. Having read hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to Winnicott and interviewed more than 900 of his acquaintances, Kahr surely knows more about Winnicott's personal and professional life than any other person alive. Among the many nuggets he shares are: the fact that Winnicott “barely eked his way through medical training,” and that the man who would do so much to broaden our understanding of child development may well have chosen a path in children's medicine because he “had no alternative but to embrace [that] much-neglected and much-denigrated speciality” (Kahr, 2019, p. 111); that Winnicott was turned down for a staff appointment at the Kleinian-dominated Tavistock clinic; that when he set up a private practice in 1923, he had so few, if any, patients he paid some of his hospital patients to come to his office so as not to be embarrassed in front of his own porter; and that Winnicott, through the “scads of cases” he referred from Paddington Green Children's Hospital, was almost single-handedly responsible for the flourishing of “child psychoanalytical training at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis and the treatment of young people at the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis” (Kahr, 2019, p. 116). All of this is by itself worth the price of admission.

Kahr's more general argument, about the role of Winnicott's two analyses in explaining the difference in his two marital choices, is compelling. Kahr makes the case well that Winnicott's analyses likely benefited him greatly, and that those fifteen years “may well … [have] saved him from a further marital disaster” (Kahr, 2019, p. 120). On such matters, one can, of course, only speculate, but Kahr's spec