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8th January 1940
Dear Dr. Friedlander:
D. W. Winnicott
I was very tired last Thursday evening and partly because of this and partly because your paper suggested several different themes I did not say some things I should have liked to have said on the main point brought forward.
Your observation on the way ordinary people reacted to the war by expressing opinions without being willing to discuss them is certainly valid. I am not quite sure whether you attempted to explain the mechanism of this, but one of your questions was quite simply asking whether others have noted what you have noted. I have.
You would, I suppose, agree there is nothing new in the fact that people hold opinions which they must put forward and which they cannot discuss. You mean that the war became one of these themes that are used compulsively, and that, at the time of greatest stress, people who usually can discuss opinions became temporarily unable or unwilling to do so.
I think it is very interesting to try to find out more about the reason for this change.
The uncertainty must itself contribute largely to the individual's need to employ magic, as Dr. Payne said (following Dr. Kris's introduction to the idea of magic). This leads to the question, why is uncertainty alarming? This in turn leads to the idea of control. The greater the uncertainty the greater the need for control, and one method of control is by ideas and statement of words; even evil, when it is predicted is better than the prospect of uncontrolled possibilities.
One would find some individuals who must control in this way, and others who are much less under such a compulsion. A way of classifying these would be to speak of those who need to control (magically) the political situation as those who use the political situation to represent a chunk of their own inner world (or unconscious fantasy) for which they cannot bear full responsibility. This is half way between depression and elation, between carrying the sins of the whole world,