Wives and Analysts: Or, How Winnicott Became Winnicott

It is a great honour to respond to Brett Kahr's article. No other living person knows more than Kahr about Winnicott's life, and in this article the reader is given a glimpse of the extraordinary archive of biographical information that he has accumulated over the last thirty years or so. This article has all of the virtues one associates with Kahr's writing: meticulous scholarship, compassion, and a wide point of view. The following remarks are an attempt to build on some of his arguments.

What was it about Winnicott's marriage to Alice that made it so hard to turn around? Kahr says that the smiling figures in the wedding photos may have been presenting false selves to the world and I am sure he is right. Individuals making a marriage in their twenties almost always have more growing up to do, so a certain amount of “false self” functioning is to be expected. As Kahr shows us, Winnicott had to live down the disappointment of a mediocre academic career and was able to do so by throwing himself into his work as a paediatrician and beginning his analysis with Strachey. Alice, by contrast, began promisingly enough. She took the Natural Sciences Tripos at Newnham and spent the years of the First World War as a junior assistant in the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, carrying out research into ceramics and optical glass. She seems to have resolved to become a potter as a result of the work she did there. At Teddington, she suffered an accident that resulted in a head injury. This injury seems to have coincided with the onset of narcolepsy and occasional hallucinations. There is an extensive medical literature showing a strong association between brain injury and narcolepsy (for an excellent survey see Viola-Saltzman and Musleh (2016)). Narcolepsy is usually caused by sleep apnoea which often goes with hypnagogic hallucinations, because sufferers are usually sleep-deprived. (Specifically, they do not get enough Slow Wave Sleep—NREM 3 and 4—or REM sleep, which re