Winnicott

"When 'Critical Theory's is more narrowly intended to refer to the Frankfurt School and its heirs, Winnicott's thinking informs the work of both Jessica Benjamin (1977, 1978, 1990) and Axel Honneth (1995)" (324)"With the articulations of Philips and Nelson in mind, this article sets out to think about this recent interest in Winnicott in relation to the idea of 'counter-culture,' itself an unstable and contested term, admittedly. Whilst reluctant to make any strong claims about Winnicott's counter-cultural status, the article wagers, however, that thinking Winnicott in relation to historical and critical understandings of 'counter-culture' helps in answering the question Nelson poses: Why Winnicott now?" (324)"Herbert Marcuse (1969) wrote in his famous Essay on Liberation that 'the power of established societies' prevents the utopian, understood as a form of unsublimated creativity, from coming into being (p. 4). 'The young militants,' he stated, 'know or sense that what is at stake is simple their life, the life of human beings which has become a plaything in the hands of politicians and managers and generals' (p. x). From a critical perspective, the sense of 'counter-culture' as a form of resistance to hegemonic political, social and cultural, not to mention economic, norms remain vital" (326)"As I will show, this sense of 'counter-culture' - as a reaction to 'pathological issues' and an expression of ideological preoccupations at odds with and marginal to dominant ideas of 'common sense' - is useful in thinking about Winnicott and his purchase on the contemporary critical imagination. However, Winnicott's place in the history of post-war social change is also vital in understanding this relationship. Winnicott played a central role in shaping post-war administered society, which became the target of the counter-cultural rebellion, and he contributed to a politics of care that continues to provide a counter-narrative to the 'common sense' of contemporary neoliberal ideology" (326)"In his later work, Playing and Reality (1991a), first published in 1971, he replaced the idea that the capacity to know constitutes a criterion of mental health with the capacity to play, to live creatively (Philips, 2007, p. 47)" (327)"Winnicott shared with the radicals, and with Marcuse, the legacy of Romanticism, and its trust in authenticity, creativity, spontaneity, and aliveness. Winnicott's own politics were not radical, however" (327)"Winnicott was committed to the question of what makes a healthy individual *Caldwell, 2013, p. xvi) and his answer was maternal care. Nevertheless, he saw the mother's capacity to care as at least in part dependent on a stability facilitated by the wider society" (329)"The welfare state shared much of the ethos of Winnicott's thinking. Barry Richards (1984) suggests that object relations theorists offered 'the translation of war-time practices into wide-ranging civil objectives to reform capitalism by applying theoretical insights into the infantile dimension of adult psychology to practices in welfare and industry; in short to humanize capitalism according to psychoanalytic principles' (p. 13)" (329)"Unlike the more traditional approaches to childrearing that held favour in the pre-war period, experts like Winnicott urged mothers to forego strict rules and restraint, advocating instead a kind of intuitive and permissive mothering that appealed to a socially progressive generation (Wilson, 1980 p. 189). These more liberal attitudes had created the conditions for freedom of thought, Winnicott (1991a) argues, writing that '[i]f you do all you can to promote personal growth in your offspring, you will need to be able to deal with startling results" (p. 143). Winnicott avers that what he coyly terms 'the present-day troubles' are a sign of social success (p. 143)" (331)"Nancy Fraser (2013)... On Fraser's analysis, second wave feminism (broadly conceived as she admits) took issue with welfare state capitalism and attacked it. This attack, however, unwittingly provided discursive tools that governments could mobilize in order to weaken and erode the welfare state (p.. 212-214). As already discussed, second-wave feminists critiqued the androcentrism and paternalism of the welfare state, arguing that it worked to maintain existing relations of inequality between men and women by valorizing work from which many womer were excluded. Whilst the idea that both before and after the war women did not work is a myth, the critique of the family wage centered on women's desire to be given equal rights to work as men. Women demnaded not only access to jobs, but the possibility of flexible and part-time work that could be organized around caring responsibilities. Fraser argues that the critique of the family wage 'now supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capitalism with a higher meaning and moral point' (p. 220) through its cliam to be meeting demands for freedom and gender equality. 'The dream of women's emancipation,' writes Fraser, 'its harnessed to the engine of capitalist accumulation' (p. 221)" (334-335)"For Fraser (2013), women's entry into work has also served 'to intensify capitalism's valorization of waged labour' (p. 221). Today, few are exempt from the demand to work, whether they have caring responsibilities or not, leading to the double burden of work and care. As these pressures have increased, welfare support has concurrently been reduced. For Fraser, second-wave feminism's demand for economic autonomy has been co-opted to justify this destruction. 'It seemed a short step,' she writes, 'from second-wave feminism's critique of welfare-state paternalism to Margaret Thatcher's critique of the nanny state' (p. 221)." (335)"Whilst feminism and neoliberalism may both have harboured reservations about the welfare state, Fraser can be criticized for downplaying political arguments and emphasizing the cunning of capital as the driving force behind these changes. The rolling back of the welfare state was facilitated by ideas of individuality and personal responsibility that won out over the commitment to social solidarity. These were widespread cultural attitudes, not the product of feminism. However, Fraser's views on the necessary direction of contemporary activism and strategy have much in common with Benjamin's (1990) position, outlined above. Fraser (2013) urges feminists today to return to the key tenets of second-wave feminism: a concern with the sexual division of labour and with the gendered nature of value judgments that distinguish estimable from unimportant work. 'Feminists might militate,' she writes, 'for a form of life that decenters waged work and valorized uncommodified activities, including, but not only, carework' (p. 226). They must militate, then, for the unrealized demand of second-wave feminism that care be taken seriously" (335-336)"Care is central to contemporary philosophical and feminist discourses that seek to contest masculinist ethical, poitical and ontological assumptions (Cavarero, 2016; Giligan, 1990; Tronto, 1993). However, the principle of care is not a panacea, and the idea that are is an uncommodified activity must be questioned. The critiques of black feminists (Crenshaw, 1991; hooks, 1981) have long complicated our understanding of the sexual division of labour, and the freedom granted to some women to enter the job marked since the 1970s has produced a 'care deficit' that requires the low-paid work of less affluent, often female 'others', reinscribing long-standing structures of inequality (Hochschild, 2003, p. 214). Notions of self-realization and autonomy, adapted to serve capital, encourage the rejection of caring roles and underpin the commodification of caring in 'new spaces of marketized domesticity' (Green and Lawson, 2011, p. 646). Privatized forms of care, such as care homes and nannies, increasingly replace state provision, and the work of care is globalized: performed by women and low paid migrant workers who take on the management of needs for those able to pay" (336)"Though Winnicott celebrated the ordinary good-enough mother, he never held that the work of care be performed by the biological mother, or by a woman, only that it usually was, and it largely still is" (336)"For Ruti, however, this is a misreading, because the truth self does not describe a fixed content but rather a way of relating to the world, a flexibility that enables the fending off of psychic rigidity (p. 361). She also notes how a Lacanian emphasis on the critique of the ego and its 'era' makes it difficult to address instances when the ego is deeply wounded by oppression and its narcissistic abilities are destroyed. In contrast, the concept of the facilitating environment makes it possible to think about oppressive conditions that necessitate a focus on survival, at the expense of other, more flexible or creative forms of life (pp. 370-1). Ruti asks 'who can afford creative living?' (p. 368). Today, the answer increasingly seems to be those who can afford care in its myriad forms" (336-337)"Some have been saying this for a very long time, not least Margaret and Michael Rustin (1984), who turned to Winnicott to understand 'the preconditions for the formation of altruistic capacities so important in socialist ideas of humanity' (p. 210). How might institutions, they asked, instill in individuals the kinds of altruistic capacities that would make them tend towards socialist politics? For the Rustins, the primary caregiver must have 'security and emotional space' and provision must be made for 'caregivers themselves to be cared for' (p. 213) if infants are to 'grow beyond a self-centered and narcissistic attitude to their human environment' (p. 210). The Rustins are not making an argument for the functions of the biological mother, but for taking care seriously. The preconditions of socialism may depend on the widespread acceptance of the socialist feminist perspective that care is vital and demands support, and this will require not the destruction of the welfare state, but its reformulation and expansion. As Fraser (2013) notes, 'unlike some of their countercultural comrades, most feminists did not reject state institutions simpliciter' (p. 216). Instead, they sought 'to infuse the latter with feminist values, they envisioned a participatory democratic state that empowered its citizens' (p. 216). Yet this agenda represents more than mere liberal reformism. As Johanna Brenner (2014) has argued convincingly, taking care and affective labour seriously would involve a confrontation with capitalism itself: "Social responsibility for care depends on the expansion of public goods, which in turn depends on taxing wealth or profits. Compensating workers for time spent in caregiving (e.g., paid parenting leave) expands paid compensation at the expense of profits. In addition, requiring (either by regulation or by contract) that workplaces accommodate and subsidize employees' caregiving outside of work interferes with employers' control over the workplace and tends to be resisted in the private sector, where jobs continue to be organized as if workers have very little responsibility for care (p. 36)" (337)https://incite-national.org/beyond-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/"In the 2013 Kilburn Manifesto, Rustin (2015) reminds us that the welfare state itself involved 'recognition of the realities of unavoidable and universal human dependency' (p. 3), a fact at odds with the ideology of personal responsibility and economic self-interest that dominates contemporary policy making (engaged in the pursuit of inadequate objects of desire)" (338)"In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Honig... claims that public things provide the focus for political action, and that the essence of contemporary political action is the contestation of these public things" (338)"Public things, or better the institutions and practices necessary to reproduce life and labour, have received scant theoretical attention because, quite bluntly, they are associated with dependence, which is in turn associated with women. Contemporary neoliberal societies continue to fail to acknowledge dependency, and valorize self-reliance, autonomy, separation and competition. Whilst the needs of small children for care are broadly acknowledged, teh values of care 'are nearly irrelevant for life outside the nursery' (Benjamin, 1990, p. 208)" (339)"This is why public things demand our attention and our energy: because they provide forms of holding and handling, like the infant care they supplement and extend, and contesting the form of that holding and handling is the work of democratic citizenship and political struggle" (339)