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From Dawn to Dusk is at one and the same time an autobiography, the story of the unfolding of an individual life or as Judith Hubback herself puts it, ‘how life and I got on together’, a piece of social history and a description of the developmental processes that create an analyst.
From the side of autobiography, the author gives a lucid account of the advantages and disadvantages of growing up in a privileged family environment. Born in 1917, ‘one of the most stressful years’ of the First World War, her childhood was profoundly marked first by her mother's emotional unavailability and subsequently by her father's increasing sense of hopelessness and futility as his hopes of a new and peaceful world clashed with the political realities of the Thirties. Hubback talks movingly about how she ‘lost’ her mother when she was very young because of the unbridged gap between a lonely and sensitive child and a mother who was unable or unwilling to cuddle or spend time with her children. She also gives us a clear account of the traumatic effect on a young child of the lack of a stable attachment figure (by the time she was three she had gone through five different nannies). This kind of emotional deprivation led to ‘a painful inner loneliness’ and to ‘a deep sense of insecurity’ which over the years developed into depressive episodes that would eventually take her into analysis. At the same time, however, Hubback's family provided a rich and stimulating cultural milieu which allowed her to develop her academic and artistic interests and the pleasure of family holidays spent in Cornwall or traipsing round Europe played a large part in furthering her lifelong love of nature. The move to England and her entrance into Downe School brought about a major change in her life. Downe School was designed specifically to further the academic and the emotional development of able girls and Hubback blossomed in its liberal and democratic atmosphere. Her time there and the years spent at Cam