D. W. Winnicott and the Capacity to Marry Well

The eminent historical figures of psychoanalysis have bequeathed their ideas, their experience, and their expertise to enrich and underpin our own clinical work. Inevitably, we may sometimes wonder about the more personal lives of these individuals and even whether such lives match up to the professional esteem in which they are held. I think this would normally be with a hope that they do, whilst still keeping in mind that we are all human and, therefore, fallible. As Kahr states when speaking generally of marital couples in therapy, “… but, in due course, they will reveal their less impressive, more traumatised parts, which often manifest only at night, in the privacy of the sitting room or bedroom.” These things we may wonder about; we are after all constantly attending in our work to the hidden elements that exist in relationships, with internalised objects or otherwise.

A number of fine biographies have been published about major figures in our profession and these works have needed to include those most personal areas of relationship that constitute actual or virtual marriage. Areas that can provide the most enriching elements in a life and which, if extended to their sublimated forms, can include a devotion to other kinds of objects: an art form, a profession, a highly valued interest, or set of ideals. A life without some kind of marriage can present a worrying void.

As the relationships and marriages of esteemed figures are contemplated, a mind might stray into the areas that contain a more explicit sexual element. Here there are, of course, problems. The privacy of erotic life is an important component of its valued intimacy and the observer and enquirer may fear any tendency to voyeurism and the underhand theft that it can contain. A sense of the temptation to spy upon the content of the parental bedroom can be worryingly evident; forbidden attractions that are so powerfully formative for the young child, and that may still lurk in their primitive form with