Celebrating a Persian Winnicott

Although I have never been there, I can still recall my first “serious” encounter with the city of London from first reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling, 1997) in a copy wrapped in some Persian newspaper as a means of camouflage, so that our headmaster, who was crazy about nothing but mathematics, would not distinguish it amongst my other notebooks. For a budding psychotherapist who grew up with Harry Potter most probably working through his phantasy life, it was not improbable at all to be drawn into the psychoanalytic “playground” of the analyst's consulting room. For me, London is a mecca of psychoanalysis in its own right, becoming as it did the home of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein, as well as those great minds who were born and bred in Great Britain, such as Wilfred Bion, John Bowlby, and Donald Winnicott.

Any reader of the history of psychoanalysis is well-aware of the voluminous and meticulous works by researchers who have left almost no stone unturned about these theoreticians, and in the case of Donald Winnicott, Brett Kahr has made a remarkable contribution. By contrast, this short article will not attempt to throw any light on Winnicott as a historical figure, but presents the reader with a living history of a Persian Donald Winnicott!

To the best of my knowledge, Iranian contact with modern psychological ideas can be traced to the early days of its appearance in the Western intellectual arena. Even with respect to Freud's predecessors, a noteworthy article appeared in a Persian newspaper published in Beirut in the 1880s informing readers of the recent discoveries of Jean-Martin Charcot (personal communication with Mr. Masud Tareh, Editor of Tārikhe Jāime Iran (A Comprehensive History of Iran). As I have given a brief account of the development of psychoanalysis in Iran elsewhere (Alinaghi, 2018b), I shall only add that, although there is evidence of an Iranian psychiatrist, Dr Ahmad Ordubādi, being in personal contact