broken bounds: contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency

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BOOK REVIEW Broken Bounds: Contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency, edited by Christopher Reeves, Karnac Books, 2012, 160 pp. (paperback) This slim and readable volume dedicated to exploring Donald Winnicott’s concept of the ‘antisocial tendency’ is to be welcomed for its contemporary relevance and appeal to all those working with psychologically disturbed youngsters. The book is the publication of a series of six child and adolescent lectures on the theme of the antisocial tendency, organized by the Squiggle Foundation in 2009/2010 and given by child and adolescent psychotherapists and other leading professionals who have extensive experience of working in the fields of child mental health, residential child care and child care policy. Because each speaker was given little specific brief in relation to the theme of the antisocial tendency and was unaware of the content of the other lectures in the series, the publication of their talks has resulted in some overlap and repetition regarding content and context. However, this is outweighed by the immediacy and evocativeness of the, often very personal, accounts of each speaker’s interpretation and experience of Winnicott’s thinking on antisocial youth, including some vivid case examples (see the chapters by Ann Horne and Jenny Sprince), accounts that are accessible to a non-specialist audience and readership but are deeply moving. These papers confirm Winnicott’s continued significance in the twenty-first century. In the UK, the unforeseen 2011 summer riots lend added poignancy to the publication of these lectures. The public disorder which so suddenly and dramatically erupted is explored in a postscript by Adrian Ward to the original lectures. He suggests that the rioting represents a form of communication which reflects the current discontent and despair of a very deprived and disadvantaged section of our country’s youth, comprising young people who know no other way of communicating their distress except through action. The behaviour expresses resentment, but also hope and the wish to be stopped. I am sure Winnicott would be in full agreement with this analysis. Winnicott’s genius was to recognize and articulate not only the protest, but also, critically, the hope in the delinquent acts of the youngsters whom he saw. He made an important distinction between what he called ‘privation’ and ‘deprivation’, which has critical bearing on the development of the antisocial tendency. In privation, there have never been any good objects or experiences and the child is unable to develop a fully formed ego, which can only lead to hopelessness, despair and, in the worst case, psychosis. He reserves the term ‘deprivation’ to describe the situation of the child for whom there have been some early good experiences, but these have been lost in later failures of care, leaving the child feeling incomplete and insecure and unconsciously yearning for what he ISSN 0266-8734 print/ISSN 1474-9734 online q 2012 The Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02668734.2012.712779 http://www.tandfonline.com Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Vol. 26, No. 3, September 2012, 252–255

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Page 1: Broken Bounds: Contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency

BOOK REVIEW

Broken Bounds: Contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency, edited

by Christopher Reeves, Karnac Books, 2012, 160 pp. (paperback)

This slim and readable volume dedicated to exploring Donald Winnicott’s concept

of the ‘antisocial tendency’ is to be welcomed for its contemporary relevance and

appeal to all those working with psychologically disturbed youngsters. The book is

the publication of a series of six child and adolescent lectures on the theme of the

antisocial tendency, organized by the Squiggle Foundation in 2009/2010 and

given by child and adolescent psychotherapists and other leading professionals

who have extensive experience of working in the fields of child mental health,

residential child care and child care policy. Because each speaker was given little

specific brief in relation to the theme of the antisocial tendency and was unaware of

the content of the other lectures in the series, the publication of their talks has

resulted in some overlap and repetition regarding content and context. However,

this is outweighed by the immediacy and evocativeness of the, often very personal,

accounts of each speaker’s interpretation and experience of Winnicott’s thinking

on antisocial youth, including some vivid case examples (see the chapters by Ann

Horne and Jenny Sprince), accounts that are accessible to a non-specialist

audience and readership but are deeply moving.

These papers confirm Winnicott’s continued significance in the twenty-first

century. In the UK, the unforeseen 2011 summer riots lend added poignancy to

the publication of these lectures. The public disorder which so suddenly and

dramatically erupted is explored in a postscript by Adrian Ward to the original

lectures. He suggests that the rioting represents a form of communication which

reflects the current discontent and despair of a very deprived and disadvantaged

section of our country’s youth, comprising young people who know no other way

of communicating their distress except through action. The behaviour expresses

resentment, but also hope and the wish to be stopped. I am sure Winnicott would

be in full agreement with this analysis.

Winnicott’s genius was to recognize and articulate not only the protest, but

also, critically, the hope in the delinquent acts of the youngsters whom he saw. He

made an important distinction between what he called ‘privation’ and

‘deprivation’, which has critical bearing on the development of the antisocial

tendency. In privation, there have never been any good objects or experiences and

the child is unable to develop a fully formed ego, which can only lead to

hopelessness, despair and, in the worst case, psychosis. He reserves the term

‘deprivation’ to describe the situation of the child for whom there have been some

early good experiences, but these have been lost in later failures of care, leaving

the child feeling incomplete and insecure and unconsciously yearning for what he

ISSN 0266-8734 print/ISSN 1474-9734 online

q 2012 The Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02668734.2012.712779

http://www.tandfonline.com

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,

Vol. 26, No. 3, September 2012, 252–255

Page 2: Broken Bounds: Contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency

or she originally had. In these children, their ‘antisocial tendencies’ of anger,

resentment and violence can be seen as more hopeful attempts to regain the lost

object, a communication that is seeking a response. However, if this disguised cry

for help and containment is ignored or the response is solely punitive, as so

frequently is the case, the antisocial tendency may harden into real delinquency,

and form part of the young person’s character defences and way of relating to

others that become much more difficult to alter.

An important question raised by some of the book’s contributors is whether

more children today suffer from actual experiences of privation, rather than

deprivation than in Winnicott’s time, half a century ago. Winnicott’s

conceptualization of the antisocial tendency was very much influenced by his

work with children who were evacuated during the war. Although these children

were deeply traumatized by the forced separation from their parents and in some

cases suffered long-lasting damage, the majority had experienced ‘good enough’

parenting prior to this. For Winnicott, therefore, the main trauma was loss and

separation from a previously good object (i.e. deprivation), which is different

from the experiences of the children who form the bulk of today’s children’s

services’ case loads or those in residential care, who have suffered serious neglect

and/or abuse from their caregivers from the start (i.e. privation).

In her fascinating lecture, Olive Stephenson provides an analysis of the

changes in child care policy and practice, particularly concerning the relationship

between the family and the state and the state’s increased obligation towards the

child since Winnicott’s time, as well as describing a more personal account of her

relationship with Donald Winnicott and his wife Claire. Stevenson laments the

more punitive attitudes that seem to prevail today and highlights the unhelpful

structural divide that exists between those agencies dealing in a more therapeutic

fashion with the younger ‘deprived’ children, and those dealing more punitively

with the ‘depraved’, without recognizing that the latter are the very same

children, now just a bit older. Here a developmental viewpoint has been lost, and

it becomes forgotten that the perpetrator was once a victim, and that the original

situation of parental adversity and neglect has been replicated within the wider

system which responds by punishment not understanding.

Winnicott did not disapprove of punishment – in fact he thought it was a

critical element of society’s response to antisocial behaviour which he recognized

was as much a sign of hate as of hope; in his view this needed to be acknowledged

and appropriate boundaries put in place. He was opposed to magistrates taking a

therapeutic role, and thought that the job of the law and the representatives of

public authority – police, magistrates and politicians – was to contain the

vengeful feelings of society. The state provided a protective membrane for

the family in the form of a benign paternal function and duty of care, but the

therapeutic work would be facilitated within the family by practitioners, such as

the ‘Children’s Officer’, who were free to function independently in the interests

of promoting ‘creative responding’ within the family.

Book review 253

Page 3: Broken Bounds: Contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency

This is an example of the close involvement that Winnicott and his wife had in

shaping social care policy and initiatives involving the welfare of the nation’s

children. The 1938–1939 wartime evacuation programme (a seminal event that is

mentioned in almost all the chapters of the book and that had a profound impact on

Winnicott’s understanding of child development) was the first time in British

history that the state took over the welfare of the country’s children from their real

parents and evacuated them from their homes in order to protect them from the

bombings. Winnicott, along with others such as Bowlby, objected at the time to

this operation due to the secondary psychological damage that they thought this

would cause in separating children from their parents, an objection that the

government did not accept until the evidence was before them in the children who

were too unmanageable to be reunited with their families after the war had ended.

Both Winnicott and his wife, however, wholeheartedly supported the provisions of

the Children Act 1948, set up in part as an attempt to rectify the consequences of the

evacuation programme, and they proposed that each new local authority children’s

service should have at its head a ‘Children’s Officer’ who knew in a personal way

all the children in that local authority’s care. Here the primary personal connection

with the child was the fundamental ingredient in care, and the organizational and

management requirements, whilst vital, would not interfere with, but would

facilitate this primary function through holding and layers of containment.

In his chapter on the family and the state, the editor of this book, Christopher

Reeves, shows how this model is based on Winnicott’s model of the family and the

role of the facilitating environment, in which the mother provides the first vital

layer of protective and facilitating cover for the not yet ‘fledged’ infant, but in

which the father has an important secondary role in providing a wider protective

layer and more objective link with the external world. This is a model of the family

that depends on a triangular relationship at its core, in which the child’s spontaneity

and creativity emerge through a process of maturation facilitated by a gradually

expanding and collaborative environment: first provided by the parents in their

respective roles, and as the child grows older his physical, emotional, educational

and social well-being develop through wider contact with grandparents and

relatives, peers, teachers and others, and ultimately with the institutions of state.

Triangulation, the role of the ‘third’ or ‘paternal function’ have of course

become key concepts within psychoanalysis, but their wider acceptance may have

become undermined by misunderstandings about what Winnicott meant by the

‘normal family’. The structure of our society has changed radically since

Winnicott’s time, with the fragmentation of the nuclear family unit and emergence

of different family configurations such as same sex parents, the increase in children

who have experienced parental separation resulting in them being raised by one

parent or other relatives and the increase in children who have been removed from

their parents altogether and are in the care of the state. However, despite these

seismic shifts in child care provision and attitudes, the importance of Winnicott’s

ideas still hold – that a child’s basic needs are to be loved and affirmed as an

independent person by significant others who may offer different but

Book review254

Page 4: Broken Bounds: Contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency

complementary ways of thinking and being, and if these needs are not met, the

child will protest, which in some cases will be expressed by antisocial tendencies.

Winnicott also offers us an important developmental framework in which these

needs and their ‘good enough’ responses from the child’s environment unfold

sequentially, building on previous levels of stability and maturation. Here,

Winnicott’s ideas intertwine with those of Bowlby, who was one of his most

important contemporaries and another psychoanalyst who was also vocal in raising

concerns about the injurious effects on the children who were evacuated. Although

the two men had significant differences of opinion in the nature of these difficulties

and how to repair them, as Reeves points out in his lecture – Bowlby thought that

children should be re-integrated into a family, not an institution, whereas

Winnicott saw the psychological effects of separation as an illness that needed to

be addressed by a programme of remedial action that could be provided by

institutional care if the ideal home was not available – the two men were grappling

with very similar issues. In addressing children’s aggressive and antisocial

responses, Bowlby’s (1944) term ‘affectionless psychopaths’ for children whose

apparent indifference to others concealed their terror of ‘the risk of their hearts

being broken again’ has much in common with Winnicott’s concepts of the

antisocial tendency and delinquency.

Few psychoanalysts since Winnicott have had such a profound effect on our

ways of thinking and practicing both in the field of mental health and in the wider

political sphere in shaping social policy. At the same time Winnicott was held in

high public esteem – Winnicott’s radio broadcasts on all aspects of the family and

parenting were listened to by millions. His legacy is manifold and cannot be easily

summarized. Richard Rollinson, in one of the final chapters of this volume,

describes Winnicott’s ‘pillars’ – of reliability, holding, a non-moralistic attitude

and ‘no gratitude necessary’. These perhaps sum up the crucial elements of the best

response that we can aim to give to the children and adolescents today who know

no other way to communicate their misery except by displaying the antisocial

tendency; if they encounter such a response perhaps they will not progress into

angry and alienated antisocial adults and perpetuate the cycle of abuse. I would

recommend all those who work with aggressive and antisocial behaviour in adults

as well as children to read this book, whether or not they are already familiar with

Winnicott’s work, to enable them to see the communication behind the behaviour

and to hold on to hope.

Jessica Yakeley

Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy, Portman Clinic, Tavistock

and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and Psychoanalyst in private practice

Email: [email protected]

q 2012, Jessica Yakeley

Book review 255