‘One Large Secure, Solid Background’: Melanie Klein and the Origins of the British Welfare State

Abstract

Changes in psychoanalysis in the 1930s reflected a broader pattern of democratization associated with what historians have termed ‘the second industrial revolution,’ a revolution that included both modernist cultural experimentation and social democracy. On the one hand, Melanie Klein's radically new and ‘feminine’ focus on concrete relations with immediate others reflected the rise of personal life: forms of life not reducible to one's social role. At the same time, Klein's thought resonated with a working-class and popular-front belief in organicism, connection and group belonging. In both cases the relation to the mother was critical. Hence, there were deep connections between Klein's thought and the Beveridge welfare state. Psychoanalysis did not generate the welfare state's focus on the mother/infant bond; the welfare state did not normalize British analysis. But there was an ‘elective affinity’ between the two histories and it operated at a very deep level.

Child psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the UK National Health Service: an historical analysis

“…Indeed the differences between the USA and Britain were refl ected in the pre-war membership of the British Psychoanalytical Association, which had a strong non-medical component. This led to more opportunities for women, who tended to have backgrounds in education and were interested in child rather than adult psychoanalysis (Zaretsky, 1999). Interestingly, the emergence of the neo-Kleinians (including Winnicott) is characterized by Zaretsky as the 'remasculinization of British Analysis', i.e., Melanie Klein was no longer the 'emblematic analyst' (Zaretsky, 1999: 150) in the post-war period.…”

“…As a doctor, Winnicott had shared many of the medical profession's reservations about the NHS prior to its inception (Rodman, 1987). However he is credited with having the foresight, along with Bowlby, to prepare for the inclusion of psychotherapy in the state-funded service (Zaretsky, 1999). He expressed strong views about the structure of training programmes in child psychotherapy.…”

Constructing and Addressing the 'Ordinary Devoted Mother'

“…125 Certainly Winnicott, as part of the British school of object relation theorists, translated psychoanalysis from a theory of sexual desire -with which it had become so deeply associated as a result of Freudianism -into what Phillips calls 'a theory of emotional nurture.' 126 (He was also much more on the side of fun than Klein.)…”

Beyond the consulting room: Winnicott the broadcaster*

“…Campaigns by interwar criminologists for penal reform, saturated with psychoanalytic thinking, also proved influential, helping to shape popular conceptions about how to treat delinquency (Waters, 1998) -an approach famously satirised by the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story in Stephen Sondheim's lyrics for "Gee Officer Krupke": "This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care." Zaretsky (1999) has called Winnicott "the first English analytic media celebrity". Certainly, as part of the British school of object relations theorists, his broadcasts offered a psychoanalysis that wasn't introspective (Thomson, 2006), or full of the dark Jewish mittel-European drives of Freud and Klein's destructive infant.…”