Hate in the Countertransference

I first came into contact with Winnicott's ideas when, as a fresh-faced graduate, I went to work at the Cotswold Community, a therapeutic community for 10-18-year-old boys in Wiltshire. Some time beforehand,

the Community had been painfully transformed from an approved school through the hugely impressive work of Richard Balbernie, the Principal, and Barbara Dockar-Drysdale, a child psychotherapist who had been powerfully influenced by her contact with Winnicott. I was placed in a household with the youngest boys, those who had been assessed as ‘unintegrated’ (Winnicott, 1945) — that is, whose sense of self was extremely fragile. In order to provide them with the ‘good-enough’ mothering it seemed they had missed out on, the culture was geared towards encouraging the ‘regression to dependence’ (Winnicott, 1954). This did not consist of providing concrete manifestations of infancy — such as bottles and nappies — which, one heard, did happen in other settings. Instead, we assumed a level of symbolization had been reached, and responded to infantile needs through something symbolic — for example, a food to be regularly offered by the key-worker at bedtime, until it seemed right for weaning to take place.

In practice, the collectively low level of ego functioning in the group meant that I and other staff members spent many days (and nights) attempting to bring boys down from the roof, where they had retreated from ‘unthinkable anxiety’ (Winnicott, 1962) in a state of raucous delinquent merger. So I suppose my first hard-won lesson was that you cannot ‘do therapy’ until you have management, boundaries and containment. (Winnicott speaks of ‘patients whose analyses must deal with the early stages of emotional development before and up to the establishment of the personality as an entity, before the achievement of space-time unit status … the accent is more surely on management, and sometimes over long periods with these patients ordinary analytic work has to be in abeyance