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Who could deny that the world is suffused with suffering, or that the proper response to this suffering - social, psychological and ecological - is a repertoire of caring practices, policies and institutions? In Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, Joanna Kellond makes an impassioned argument for a politics of care that could respond to spiralling crises of carelessness. Kellond bases her argument on a close and careful reading of the work of D.W. Winnicott, the twentieth-century paediatrician and psychoanalyst whose work cemented the so-called ‘relational turn’ within psychoanalysis, which shifted analysis from an orthodox model emphasizing the repressed drives of an Oedipal subject whose primary challenge is to achieve autonomy, towards a model of interdependency in which the autonomous individual cannot be separated from its facilitating environment. Winnicott’s most famous phrase is that there ‘is no such thing as a baby’, that is, that there is no individual unit without the relational matrix of care provided by others. Winnicott is undoubtedly, then, a valuable resource for Kellond’s explicit aim, which is ‘to explore the historical, political and ontological significance of care; its relationship with human life, psychic change and social transformation’ (p. 3).
Kellond positions her argument within the tradition of critical theory, with its psychosocial orientation that leans heavily on psychoanalysis as a tool for detecting social pathologies and possibilities. Kellond’s work, like the best of the critical theory tradition, is both an attempt to insightfully interpret social realities and a discussion of the need and the means for social transformation (p. 18).