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Gianna Williams is a consultant child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic in London, working in the Adolescent Department. She is remembered in the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) for having conducted in the late 1970 s the baby observation seminars that were so fruitful in Dr Michael Fordham's work on a model of development. An account of this period is given in the interview with Gianna Williams in the special issue of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy that commemorates the work of (Vol. 22 No 1, April 1996).
This paper arises out of her work with patients with eating disorders who have developed what she calls a ‘no entry system of defence’. For those familiar with Fordham's work, the concept of a no entry system resonates with his idea of defences of the self, or what he later thought of as a defence pathology of the self. This is not to propose that the two concepts are the same, because they arise from two different models of the psyche, and Gianna Williams's telling formulations are worked out in a precise way in the context of Klein's and Bion's models. Nevertheless, I think that the link can be seen at the end of the paper where Williams refers to Rosenfeld's idea that projective processes can take place in the womb in a way that prevents a normal relationship, so that the child may be phobic about the mother from the beginning. This observation, which is about autistic children, is understood by Williams to relate to a spectrum of ‘no entry defences’ in which autism is at the extreme end, while other defences might manifest themselves in a milder form with an isolated symptom such as anorexia. Fordham's hypothesis is that autism results from a failure of the primary self to deintegrate satisfactorily. Perhaps ‘no entry’ is related to Fordham's idea of a failure to ‘reach out’, but seen from a vantage point that is outside rather than inside.
The paper explores aspects of the thinking that informs Williams's recently published book