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Dilys opens her volume of selected works with the line: ‘The quiet subversiveness of psychoanalytic thinking!’ and goes on to note that ‘Subversive means positively turning things over, uprooting. The more negative undermining is only one facet of its meaning’ (p. vii).
I think ‘quietly subversive’ was actually something someone once said about Dilys, but with her typical generosity she shares the compliment with all of us working psychoanalytically. Of course, psychoanalytic thinking is subversive, concerning itself, as it does, with unearthing what is buried beneath conscious awareness and with understanding the lower strata of early experience. However, there is something specific about Dilys and her work that is ‘quietly subversive’ in a unique way. Her pioneering work with under-fives, and particularly with babies and their parents, has taught us something important. She has shown how, even when problems are entrenched, with roots reaching far back to the parents’ early histories and beyond, a quick deft tug can free things up. She might argue that this is because the soil is friable around this time due to all that gets churned up around having a baby. But I think we know that it is also something to do with her having a dextrous mind, and a mind that is given to playful troublemaking. In this way, I think that the apparently negative aspect of subversiveness as ‘undermining’ is also fitting, but for all the right reasons.
In work with families, she undermines unhelpful belief systems by challenging them in the here and now, using the evidence gathered through her close observation. This is done with humour or, more often, a sort of directness that startles, so that the recipient doesn’t quite have a chance to take offence. There is a leap of faith here, faith in the other to be able to survive the shock and make use of the startling idea.
In her political work, her campaigning and lobbying, she has, with colleagues, made real changes to funding for the early yea