99. Letter from Donald Winnicott to a Confidant, 15th April 1966

15th April 1966.

Dear M:

Thank you for your postcard. I think that you know the answer to your question because you have been in a state of primary maternal preoccupation relative to your new baby, and from what you write you seem to have enjoyed the experience. Anthropologically you would recognise this under the term couvade, but it seems rather nasty to give a name to something that is being experienced in the present.

I wonder whether you can make use of this idea. Everybody is bisexual in the sense of the capacity to identify with man and woman. There is a great difference, however, between a unified personality such as that of a man with a capacity for identification with a woman, and a similar but different thing, a male man with a split off woman self. I have tried to refer to this in a paper which is not published but which you could look at if you liked, in which I talk about the male and female elements in men and women. Others of course have written on the same subject.

What strikes me is that in your own development you may be in the process of changing over from being a male with a split off woman self to being a more integrated individual containing all the elements including the two identifications.

I think that the study of man's identification with woman has been very much complicated by a persistent attempt on the part of psycho-analysts to call everything that is not male in a man homosexuality, whereas in fact homosexuality is a secondary matter or less fundamental and rather a nuisance when one is trying to get at man's woman identification.

I don't know whether you can make anything of this very condensed note but in any case there is always the waste paper basket!

Good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

D. W. Winnicott, F.R.C.P.