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If I were asked to name a key text from the days of my training in Child Psychotherapy, it would be Susan Isaacs’s The Nature and Function of Phantasy. Reading this seminal paper for the first time was for me a milestone moment in the development of my understanding of Kleinian theory; its systematic clarity offered me a grasp of the meaning of the idea of unconscious ph-antasy. I was also struck by the explicit setting out of the distinctive character of data gathering in the analytic method; the importance of the observation of context, and the detailed approach that is in the blood of psychoanalytic training, yet here for the first time I saw it set down as a defining ‘method’ of gathering evidence. I learnt that this was one of the Kleinian contributions in the period of ‘The Controversial Discussions’ in the British Psychoanalytical Society in the 1940s, but I otherwise knew nothing of Isaacs as a pioneer. Unlike Winnicott and Bowlby who gained public prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, the contribution of Susan Isaacs in the first half remains relatively unknown.
In Wise words: How Susan Isaacs changed parenting, Caroline Vollans has given us access to Isaacs’s public writings, which appeared under the pseudonym of Ursula Wise between 1929 and 1936. During that time, as an ‘agony aunt’ correspondent in The Nursery World, ‘Ursula Wise’, wrote a weekly parenting column, in which she responded to letters from worried mothers and nannies, describing their dilemmas and difficulties with their young children. Vollans, a primary school teacher for many years, who then trained in psychoanalysis, notes that she came across the work of Isaacs only after her professional trainings, despite Isaacs's influence in the fields of both education and psychoanalysis. Prompted by this gap in recognition, Vollans went on to unearth the Susan Isaacs Archive at the Institute of Education (where Isaacs was head of the Child Development Department in 1933), and has