The Squiggle Foundation

It is, of course, not by chance that Winnicott attracted no body of clinicians who formed a training around his name. This would have contradicted the very essence of his particular and passionate conviction of the essential need, if individuals were to feel real and vital, for them to create theory for themselves, with originality and with pleasure, out of the discoveries of Freud, Klein, his own and those of other psychoanalytic thinkers, transforming them into their own personal tradition.

It is the spontaneous gesture—this impulse towards creativity as it meets up with the reality principle—that formed the basis for Winnicott's Squiggle technique from which our Foundation has taken its name.

The founder of The Squiggle Foundation, Alexander Newman, recognized the heuristic vigour which lay at the heart of Winnicott — this romantic philosopher, paediatrician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Newman, who worked with young family care workers more than twenty years ago, saw that they were left largely to struggle alone with the overwhelming needs of those suffering from psychological, social and economic privation and deprivation. In response, he began to run yearlong seminar courses, which became known as ‘Original Themes in the Work of D.W. Winnicott’. He hoped that these would provide both a theoretical framework of developmental psychology and a containing environment in ways that would encourage these hard-pressed workers to meet some of the needs of their clients under multiple stress.

Hence the early courses were aimed particularly at young family care workers, nursery nurses and residential care workers with children. As these courses developed, they began to attract psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, music, art and drama therapists, counsellors, teachers, social workers, GPs, community psychiatric workers, architects, writers, academics and artists. The foremost in this company, one