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I think that it was about 1983 around the time of the Portman Clinic's Golden Jubilee conference that I first came across Dr Welldon's work although if I remember correctly, to my disappointment, she had to cancel her presentation on that occasion. At the time I was struggling with cases of abused children and trying to make some sense of the assaults to which they had been subject. The orthodoxy of the time was that only men were responsible for the abuse of children, and women in one way or another, also invariably victims. At best this seemed to me to be an unhelpful over-simplification and at worst a damaging fiction. Although men were clearly the most frequent perpetrators of abuse, and certainly those most often resorting to assaultive behaviour, there were also cases in which mothers were the authors of their children's bruises, burns and broken bones. These matters became even more difficult to evaluate and understand when questions of emotional and psychological damage were brought into the picture; not least this is because the psychological realm is so much more fluid, ephemeral and ambiguous. If because of this it was harder to give matters of emotional abuse the attention that was needed, it also made it easier to turn a blind eye and not do so. Upon such rocks many carefully built vessels of child protection policy and procedure have foundered.
In this paper written for the Portman Clinic's seventy-fifth anniversary, Professor Gilligan acknowledges the importance of Estela Welldon's work over the last thirty years and the contribution that she has made to the analytic understanding of aggression and violence, especially in relation to women. Welldon's work was controversial at the time and denounced in some quarters, including by some feminists. Quite quickly, however, the value of what she had to say was recognized including amongst many of the people who had initially criticized her.
Here Gilligan reviews the subject of violence, drawing upon his own e