Constructing and Addressing the 'Ordinary Devoted Mother'

Abstract

Abstract:Donald Winnicott's 50 BBC radio talks, broadcast between 1943-62, constitute the heart of his oeuvre and were later published in the bestselling book, 'The Child, the Family and the Outside World'. This article argues that, although commentators have routinely alluded to the broadcast origins of these talks, the importance of their institutional context is commonly effaced, as a result dehistoricising them. The article seeks to recover the conditions of production of the talks as 'spoken word', emphasising Winnicott's formidable linguistic skills, his understanding of register and his sensitivity to listeners, qualities developed under the formative influence of Winnicott's two producers, Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie.Contemporary attempts by the BBC to popularise psychoanalysis met with significant resistance and criticism within the Corporation but Winnicott avoided such controversy, it is argued here, because of the way he was positioned within the BBC, and the role he played in wartime British society. The article places Winnicott among other popularisers of psychoanalytic ideas at the time, such as Susan Isaacs, John Bowlby and Ruth Thomas, and contends that, while Winnicott's idealisation of motherhood has been rightly criticised, his broadcasts also conveyed a powerful sense of motherhood as a lived experience.

Les Voix des gens ordinaires à la radio de la BBC – expériences 1930-2000

“…He was coached by one of the regular announcers who, Pickles wrote later, had most of the qualities the BBC looked for: he was steady, correct, just a voice without emotion, and his announcements were precisely right in every detail, cold and without feeling 11 These criteria made it, of course, difficult and in many periods impossible for women's voices to be heard on the radio. 12 The BBC was a decidedly male and middle-class institution. Tom Burns, in his study of the BBC, wrote of this period…”

Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age

“…Other collaborations with psychologists include the highly popular talks by pediatrician Douglas Winnicott during the late 1940s and early 1950s within Woman's Hour in a series entitled "The Ordinary Devoted Mother and Her Baby" (Karpf 2014;Shapira 2013: 134-135;Winnicott 1939Winnicott -1968). Benzie and Quigley were instrumental in getting Winnicott's talks on the air and he cited Quigley's influence in molding his radio persona and helping craft the talks as effectively as possible (Winnicott 1939(Winnicott -1968).…”

“…In 1956, Quigley was promoted out of the Woman's Hour role and gendered programming more broadly to become the BBC's chief assistant of Talks (Sound) ("Janet Quigley [Obituary]" 1987 It is now impossible to make the claim, as Anne Karpf quite accurately did so in 1980, that while "academics and women's groups have been diligently monitoring television, cinema, and the press: decoding signs of sexism, uncovering masculinist ideology, and promoting feminist alternatives … radio, the medium which permeates women's lives more than any other, has been largely ignored" (Karpf 1980: 41). The work of feminist media researchers and historians, including Karpf herself, has overturned this absence (Baker 2017;Carter 2004;Crean 1987;Hilmes 1997Hilmes , 2006Hilmes , 2013Horne 2017;Johnson 1988;Karpf 1980Karpf , 1987Karpf , 1996Karpf , 2014MacLennan 2008;Smulyan 1993;Veerkamp 2014;Wang 2002). This book has sought to contribute to this feminist project of recuperating radio 6…”

David Stafford-Clark (1916-1999): Seeing through a celebrity psychiatrist

“…Although Winnicott broadcast over the radio and not television, through the fifty radio broadcasts that he made between 1943 and 1962 he also attained fame beyond the consulting-room, yet he scrupulously avoided Stafford-Clark's moralising tone. He also refrained from intervening over the airwaves in controversial debates, despite being outspoken on subjects such as leucotomy in the medical press, and thus protected his professional reputation 1 .…”