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Jan Abram, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and in private practice in London. She is Visiting Professor of the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, and is currently Vice President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation for their Annual Conferences. She is EPF President-Elect, with her term to start in March 2024.
On May 1, 2023, at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jan Abram, who was here from the UK as the PINC International Visiting Scholar. Dr. Abram is well known as a Winnicott scholar. She is particularly esteemed for her impressive, detailed book The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott's Use of Words (1996), which is a compendium of his ideas. One of her agendas in San Francisco was to discuss her recent book, The Surviving Object (2021).
This was PINC's first in-person event since the COVID-19 lockdown, making it particularly momentous.
RC: On the shelf above my computer, front and center, is your dictionary, The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott's Use of Words (1996), which I refer to every time I teach Winnicott and on many other occasions as well. It takes quite a specific mind to write a dictionary and to capture and elucidate so many of a deep thinker's concepts. I'm wondering what it was about Winnicott that first inspired you in your own life? And then what made you decide to concretize his work in such a way that makes him so much more accessible to all of us?
JA: Maybe I should go back to where it all started. My original work was in the theatre. And I got very disillusioned with being an actor in the theatre. I mean, I loved it, but I felt that I wasn't really
contributing to society. And then I discovered theatre-in-education, and this is what I found I really loved doing. It was quite revolutionary in the 1960s. The company I worked for was called Theatre Center, set up by Brian Way, who h