broken bounds: contemporary reflections on the antisocial tendency
TRANSCRIPT
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
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Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,
Vol. 26, No. 3, September 2012, 252–255
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
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
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