!1 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Abstract: The word nachträglichkeit (‘afterwardsness’), which Freud used to theorise the formation of the symptom, gives us a complex, non-linear way of understanding temporality. Afterwardsness is crucial to both psychoanalytic and historical ways of thinking. My interpretation of D.W.Winnicott’s archive in terms of afterwardsness is thus an argument that is on the borderline of historical and psychoanalytic. Keywords: Winnicott, Lacan, Freud, topology, sexuality, nachträglichkeit I would like to thank the Winnicott Trust for granting permission to research in the Winnicott archive at the Wellcome Trust. I would like, especially, to thank the library staff and archivists at the Wellcome Library for their grace and helpfulness. Introduction. “These persons and these things are the hinges of the account.” R.A. Lafferty, Annals of Klepsis In this paper I focus upon the temporal aspects of the symptom, analysing anonymised extracts from an archive (50 boxes; the correspondence I draw upon ranges from 1915 to 1969), as well as published letters and published and unpublished writings, to show how the fantasm of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is constructed in timei. I analyse several questions to do with temporality and the relations between time and history: the non-linearity of the time of the fantasm; the historicity of this –of any– particular fantasm; and the ways in which, as analysts and writers, we can work on the borderline of psychoanalytic and historical concepts. To put my argument in the most mischievous terms: the traces of his fantasm in his writings and correspondence suggest that Winnicott, who was married twice, the second time happily, might have been gay. ‘Might have been’ is an odd construction—not ‘was’, but a queering. It’s something like an archeological construction but closer to an alternative history; posited afterwards. In any case, the archive I discuss in this paper suggests that Winnicott was a gay-friendly analyst. He also argued for the complete decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Memo to the Wolfenden Commission, with which this paper concludes. !2 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Winnicott was very feminine, so much so that many of the letters written in response to his radio broadcasts were addressed to him as Mrs Winnicottii . His analytic style was motherly: one of his key concepts was 'holding', which he theorised as providing a matrix for psychic change. One of his best articles on gender ended in philosophical speculations about 'being' and 'having', but, unlike Lacan, this wasn't formulated with regard to the phallus, the master signifier. He lived at a time when many of his colleagues, including those in a position of power, argued that homosexuals could not be analysts. To focus more explicitly on gender than on sexuality was therefore politic for him. Sexuation (that is, gender), in Lacan (with whom Winnicott corresponded) is binary: one is on the male side or the female side (psychically, irrespective of biological sex). Sexuation in Winnicott is inconsistent and split, a matter of traits. Although it is often assumed that Winnicott, like his generation of object relations theorists, had little to say about sexuality, this is not the case. Reading the volumes of Winnicott's writings published after his death (for example, Psycho-Analytic Explorations, London, Karnac Books, 1989) one finds considerable discussion of what, in Lacanese, would be called sexuality. Winnicott didn't use the Lacanese term, drive, preferring ‘instinctual tensions’, based on James Strachey's mistranslation of Treib as ‘instinct’, but these were thought as both libido and destrudo. His most influential article, ‘On “the Use of an Object”’ (in PE), is about the destructive aspects of the drive. What he has to say about sexuality and fantasy is scattered throughout the clinical material in the writings addressed to fellow analysts, (PE), and is less obvious in the work addressed to a popular audience. Very often, when the focus is on clinical material, the sexuality in question is specific, particularised, rather than a generalised ‘desire’ or ‘jouissance’. The anonymised case material in the published articles and in his one book-length case history, focuses much more on homosexuality than on heterosexuality. The archive at the Wellcome Library contains a historically significant document, a Memo !3 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com that Winnicott and a colleague at Paddington Green Hospital, where Winnicott had a large paediatric practice, sent to the Wolfenden Commission on Homosexuality and the Law. The Wolfenden Commission, 1957, recommended liberalisation of the law (which had criminalised all same-sex sexual activity), but it took another decade and a campaign by the MP Leo Abse for homosexual consensual sex between adults in private to become legal in the UK. In 2001, the age of consent was finally equalised, followed in 2004 by the Civil Partnership Act and the Marriage (Same-sex couples) Act, 2013. Winnicott's Memo was extremely liberal; Wolfenden remarked, in the Report, that “some psychiatrists” called for complete decriminalisation rather than the compromise he recommended. After Freud's death, the Institute of Psychoanalysis split into two groups, led by Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and a third group, the Middle Group or Independents. Winnicott became one of the central members of the Independent Group. During the split, he wrote to Klein, deploring the dogmatic arrogance of her lieutenants and her reluctance to let him reformulate her insights in his own words, which, he argued, was the only way that theory could move forward. He apologised for his insistence, saying that she might well say that this was his “illness” speaking—his ‘symptom’, we might say, in Lacanese. In a 1957 paper, “Excitement in the Aetiology of Coronary Thrombosis”, Winnicott, who died of the last of many heart attacks, named this symptom as ‘impotence’. In Part One, In Winnie's case at all events, or, a boost from an earthworm, I look at the several aspects of this: from sexual problems to powerlessness. In Part Two, From string to a sweetshop to a Christ fantasm, I look more closely at the temporality of the symptom, of nachträglichkeit. The case material I draw upon here is trivial; everyday. This is the grist of analysis, historical as well as psychoanalytic. In Part Three, Trends, traits, and bare identification, I discuss the Memo to the Wolfenden Commission. Mine is a Lacanian reading, but this reading is not imposed willy-nilly on the case material. Winnicott and Lacan corresponded and affected each !4 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com other's thinking. Ellie Ragland mentions 70-100 letters, the Lacan-Winnicott correspondence Clare Winnicott gave Robert Rodman, a few of which Rodman gave to Ragland to translate and publish. Part One. In Winnie's case at all events: or, a boost from an earthworm Winnie prefers his ma to be his castrator because he doesn't want to give free rein to the murderous anti-dad impulses. ….In Winnie's case at all events the normal Oedipus situation seems deeper repressed than the inverted one. (Meisel, Perry, and Walter Kendrick, editors, Bloomsbury/Freud, The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, New York, Basic Books, 1985, 330.)iii Winnicott's first analyst, James Strachey, a Bloomsberry, was bisexual. He had been analysed by Freud. James's wife, Alix, was analysed by Abraham. She became friends with Klein in Berlin, when Klein was also in analysis with Abraham. During the time that Alix spent in Berlin, James was in London, trying to set up an analytic practice. He had two analysands; one was Winnicott. James' letters to Alix about both analysands are a rich source of material: we find traces of both the analysand's signifiers and the analyst's interpretations. As my argument turns on a detailed reading of these traces, I use double inverted commas to indicate direct quotation. Single inverted commas are ‘scare-quotes’. Occasionally, I summarise rather than quote; in those vignettes, I try to retain as much of each subject’s language as possible. My writing, including the vignettes and interpretations of extracts from correspondence, notes, or published work, is intended as an example of analytic work, like dream-work or joke-work. This is a productive model; in writing psychoanalytically, I am showing or doing analytic work. The method is tropic; Nietzschean; the linguistic turn. I do not use a medical model in which the normal, stochastically the mean, is opposed to the pathological, stochastically the outliers, but also, more broadly, thought as the aberrantiv. In Lacanian circles, there is disagreement as to how many basic psychic structures there !5 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com are: neurosis and psychosis, but also, arguably, autism, and also, even more arguably, perversion. For more on Lacanian views on autism as structure, see Burgoyne (Bernard Burgoyne, “Autisms and Topology”, in Drawing the Soul. edited by Bernard Burgoyne, Rebus Press, 2000; also see Chernaik, Site Theory Paper, 2016, unpublished). A number of Lacanians, from Bursztein to Nobus, argue that perversion is not a structure in itself; as structure, perversion is a variant of neurosis. As trait, it can accompany any structure: psychotics can have neurotic traits, and also, often, perverse traits. However, many other Lacanians argue that there are three basic structures, distinguished by the type of negation that has occurred: repression or denegation for neurosis, disavowal or denial for perversion, and foreclosure for psychosis. In Freud's German, Verneinung, Verleugnung, and Verwerfung, respectively. (The critique is, it is not just fetishists who deny. Hysterics and obsessionals deny as well as question. It is questioning vs. certainty that circumscribes structure, not types of denial). In contrast, for Kleinians and Anna Freudians, neurosis, perversion, and psychosis can be thought as continuua, distinguished by the time at which negation occurred: earliest, for psychosis, latest, for neurosisv. For both IPA and non-IPA analysts, thus, there are questions about perversion: is it a separate structure, is it a variant of neurosis, is it a trait that can accompany any structure, is it a moment in a continuum? And, if perversion is a moment in a continuum, is that continuum developmental? Or is it theorised differently, in something other than linear diachronesis? For psychoanalytic theorists who think in terms of linear diachronesis, the emergence in the session or in the analysand’s narrative of oral or anal object relations is conceptualised as ‘regression’—retrograde linear temporal progression. An anal object little a can be troubling. ‘Regression’ can be equated with ‘perversion’. Consider, for example, Winnicott’s notes for his lecture on impotence (1957): “The further degree produces…any of the mental states we call abnormal…masturbation is only possible by the dragging in of pervert and regression mechanisms”. !6 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Temporality is also an issue for Lacanian theorisations, but understood in non-linear terms, in contrast to the linearity of a developmental approach. For Lacanians and Laplancheans, Freud’s notion of nachträglichkeit, in French, ’apres-coup’, or in English, ’afterwardsness’, (following Laplanche’s suggested translation, rather than Strachey’s ‘delayed action’) is key. A symptom is formed ‘afterwards’, when a second event—and its meanings, conscious and unconscious—interact with an earlier event and its meanings, conscious and unconscious. With the passage of time, afterwards, what at the time may have seemed embarrasing or agonising, becomes the material of history—moments of a personal history that can be recovered in the archive; moments of world history that demand witnessing. Winnicott and his first analyst, James Strachey, are still read, and rightly so, but they are not our contemporaries. In its historical context, Strachey’s argument about the ‘Complete Oedipus’ was a political act, as was D.W. Winnicott’s Memo to the Wolfenden Commission. I begin with Strachey. James Strachey’s idiom in his letter to Alix Strachey, is camp. He refers to his analysand, Winnicott, as “Winnie”. The ‘case’ is then theorised by Strachey in terms taken from nineteenth century sexology: ‘normality’ and ‘inversion’.vi This is a structuralist theorisation: a person's psyche has a structure produced by his or her passage through the Oedipus complex (which Strachey, to avoid pathologising language, calls the Oedipus ‘situation’). Strachey takes a universalist position: all persons are inherently bisexual, identifying with both parents and desiring both parents, traversing Oedipus twice, by a ‘normal’ route and an ‘inverse’ route. In Winnie's case, Strachey analysed his “inverted [Oedipus]”; but thought his “normal Oedipus situation” was “more deeply repressed”. Inversion, the nineteenth and early twentieth century theory of sexuality in which homosexuality was linked to cross-gender identificationvii, is a theory in which homosexuality is seen as perversion. However, as Freud's arguments about infantile polymorphous perversity !7 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com implied, perversion, in this view, becomes universal. For Strachey, arguing for a notion of the “complete Oedipus”, everyone is bisexual and all analyses should address cross-gender and samegender identifications and desiresviii. For obviously camp, very feminine male psychoanalysts, working and writing at a time when homosexuality was theorised in terms of gender inversion and in which some of their colleagues were arguing that homosexuals could not be analysts, thinking neurosis, perversion and psychosis as structure, not as continuua that may be arrayed in a linear temporal progression, is useful. Ernest Jones and Anna Freud argued that homosexuals could not be analysts because as homosexuals, their psychic structure was too ‘close’ to psychosis.ix Strachey's notion of the ‘complete’ Oedipus is thus an indirect way to disagree with Jones and Anna Freud. For example, “Jones lectured about Henrietta, and explained that the real reason why she threw over Carrington was because she (Carrington) wasn't a virgin. I lectured Jones on the Complete Oedipus Complex, of which, of course, he pretended never to have heard.” Bloomsbury/Freud, 259. A dream or a bit of acting-out that presents or represents an anal object-little-a, could, for someone who believes that anal objects are ‘early’, signify ‘regression’ to either psychosis (or psychotic moments, or cores, or nodes) or perverse character, or moments, (or cores or nodes). Linear dischronesis, in this way, can figure developmental norms, and these norms can be stochastic or ethical: that is, most frequent in a normal distribution vs. outliers, or right vs. wrong. Conceptually, we can distinguish stochastic arguments from ethical ones, but in practice, in discourses, they have often been confused. The issue is of great importance where ‘perversion’ is concerned. (It is also of importance for psychosis, which is also stigmatised). Furthermore, confusions are often multilayered and overdetermined. For Strachey, who argued for a “complete Oedipus”, composed of two strands, ‘normal’ and ‘inverse’, both of which an analyst should analyse for all analysands, homosexuality is perversion, but perversion is universal. For Strachey, Winnicott's analysis was ‘incomplete’, !8 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com unresolved, because he was unable to fully analyse a repressed heterosexuality that he expected to be there. For Winnicott, in contrast, (these are Winnicott's words, not Strachey's), his first analyst enabled him to “see babies as people”, that is, this first analysis addressed Winnicott's gender identity, which was maternal and also very camp, and provided the basis for his work with young children. For Winnicott, there was still a sexual problem, referred to, in his words, as “impotence”. Strachey and Winnicott's campness was both embodiment and manner. Both Strachey and Winnicott were feminine men with unusually high voices. Virginia Woolf said of James' brother Lytton that it was a good thing, given the high squeaky voices of the Strachey men, that a lecture of Lyttons's she attended was not recorded. As manner, we have naming, “Winnie”, and a great deal of archness in Strachey's editorial notes to Winnicott, discussing the anonymisation of names in his published cases (“There were two Queenies (nos. 7 or 13) which was decidedly more than I could bear. I resisted the temptation of re-christening the second one Zenobia and called her merely Gertie. ----September 12th 1942”). For those who knew Strachey and Winnicott, this femininity could come across as sexual impotence: Virginia Woolf describes James Strachey as lying on her bed “like an earthworm” reading a book. Winnicott analyses a patient as wanting to “boost” Winnicott's own masculinity. Strachey remarked that he grew a beard because nobody believed that he could have '“fucked” a woman. The Strachey's, Lytton and James, both of whom did indeed grow long, luxuriant beards, the sort in which Edward Lear characters keep birds, seemed to have surprised their contemporaries by having sex with both men and women. Winnicott seems to have surprised James by never actually having sex with his first wife, Alice. Rodman, Winnicott's biographer, argues that Winnicott did have sex with his second wife, Clare. We know, from a letter from Clare Britton that has been preserved, that Winnicott discussed his sexual problems with her before their marriage.x Rodman interprets Clare Britton's letter to Winnicott as an indication that they made love after that !9 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com conversation; the tone, to me, seems, rather, to indicate a moving and revealing conversation rather than a sexual experience consequent upon that conversation. As suggested by the date of Winnicott's paper on impotence (1957), the sexual problems continued in this much happier heterosexual relationship. Winnicott analyses impotence, linking it to perversion: The further degree (c) produces a highly complex state of affairs, first with alternative congestions and displaced excitements, and then with any of the mental states that we call abnormal according to the makeup of the individual. Disaster.....(hysteria), depression, depersonalisation, disintegration, sense of unreality, or a mixture, general tension (chaotic defences). Only the passage of time cures this phase in which there is impotence or frigidity, and probably there is an incapacity to masturbate, or masturbation is only possible by the dragging in of pervert and regression mechanisms. (Winnicott, D.W., Psycho-Analytic Explorations, 36-37). By (c) Winnicott means ”Delay, Displaced excitement, Congestions, Disaster.” Perversion, for Winnicott in this particular, highly personal text, is the consequence of frustrated desire. Frustrated desire leads to “disaster”: hysteria, that is neurosis, followed by an affect (depression) and a list of what could be extreme hysteria or psychosis: depersonalisation, disintegration, and sense of unreality. This is a description of an actual symptom rather than a general theoretical statement. Not surprisingly, if this was what he was living with, Winnicott considered that something remained unanalysed; his second analyst was Joan Riviere, whose best paper, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, focused on “atypical homosexuality”. The woman Riviere analysed in the paper (Heath assumes it was herself) was a manifest heterosexual whose homosexuality played itself out in competition with male colleagues.xi Winnicott was competitive with women; perhaps Riviere and Winnicott colluded in not analysing a pattern they shared. “Winnie's case”, thus, was only ‘partly analysed’ by Strachey and Riviere. If the psyche is !10 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com understood developmentally, in a single linear diachronesis, the end of analysis is ‘complete’ and some analyses are ‘partial’. (In contrast, for some Lacanians, there is an end of analysis but it is idiosycratic and barely communicatable). Like Strachey, Winnicott was camp. Like Riviere (or Riviere's patient), perhaps he was an ‘atypical’ homosexual, living a heterosexual life. Perhaps, we may suggest, Strachey and Riviere colluded in not pressing Winnicott to describe his symptom in detail. In any case, in 1957, Winnicott did discuss his symptom, ‘impotence’, in a lecture to the Society for Psycho-Somatic Research. Winnicott had a friend, a doctor who shared Winnicott's interest in psycho-somatics. Their correspondence shows the tentative nature and real warmth of this friendship. After several exchanges of letters, the correspondent wrote to Winnicott about a patient, a painter at a well known art school, a man with a “homosexual Christ fantasy”. He’d like to find the man an analyst; he can’t take him on himself as he shares the same fantasy. Winnicott responded with rather too much pedantic detail about the difficulty of finding the artist an analyst, as the artist couldn’t pay. Winnicott apologises for his inability to help.xii We can link this general sense of impotence to Winnicott's fantasm. What Winnicott frames as impotence is a significant part of his symptom. The impotence with women was terribly disturbing for Winnicott: as he writes, “Disaster.” A gender cross-identification leading to a tendency to pursue love rather than sex is not an unusual fantasm for analysts in this period: see Jean Gerard Bursztein on Helene Deutsch.xiii The fantasm Winnicott identifies as linked to his jouissance is also not unusual: the artist shared it, the doctor friend shared it. There are no further letters in this file. We don't know whether Winnicott's friendship with this man continued without leaving documentary traces, and really, it doesn't matter. However, what is clear is that he shared the fantasy. !11 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Part two. From string to a sweetshop to a Christ fantasm. Introduction: “The playing stops, or is at any rate spoiled” D. W. Winnicott's key notions of play, transitional space, and transitional objects are reworkings of Freud's notion of sublimation: No human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and ... relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.). This intermediate area is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is "lost" in play. (Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, p. 18). Winnicott, by his formulation of his concepts, is concerned to rework and overcome the binary oppositions between inside and outside, subject and object, “soul” and “body”. The main way in which he does this is to invent the idea of an “intermediate area of experience” a “transitional space” that can be used by the child (or adult) to “relate…inner and outer reality”. Freud argued that traces of the sexuality that is sublimated in the arts are legible in both the sublimated cultural work and the processes that produced this work. For Winnicott, sexuality is strongly linked to frustration: "if when a child is playing the physical excitement of instinctual involvement becomes evident, then the playing stops, or is at any rate spoiled” (Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, p. 53). Here, what we have is not a trace but a small boy with an erection and play that "stops" or "is spoiled": the impotence that he discussed in relation to his heart disease and in relation to sexual fantasies that troubled him personally, "masturbation is only possible by the dragging in of pervert and regression mechanisms.” (Winnicott, D.W., Psycho-Analytic Explorations, p. 37). Regression from Oedipal to pre-Oedipal sexuality is feared because of the association of these early psychic mechanisms with madness. This fear of madness is surmounted by development of the positive aspects of these early mechanisms, for Winnicott, child's play and adult play, that is, the arts and religion: creativity. Creativity is important for Winnicott not just !12 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com because of its role in culture but because of its function in the formation and growth of subjectivity: "it is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, p. 73). Play and creativity are thought of as basic human capacities: "it is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health” (Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, p. 56). How is this possible? How can play be universal and belonging to health, how can play be something universal that overcomes the disabling binary opposition between inner and outer worlds, “soul” and “body”, oppositions that thus, for Winnicott are less common than has sometimes been claimed, and yet be something that is a response to frustration? Frustration that is both general and personal: from the infant's frustration with the breast to a particular adult psychoanalyst's fears of regression, perversion, and impotence? Winnicott argues an infant's "spontaneous gesture" creates an "illusion of omnipotent creating and controlling,” Winnicott, D.W., The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, p. 146), that is, if the mother is "good enough" and meets the infant's needs sufficiently for this illusion to be sustainable. The infant, later the child, is able, its needs met reasonably well, to "recognise the illusory elements, the fact of playing and imagining". Just as Freud argues that the infant hallucinates fulfilment in the absence of the mother and her milk, so Winnicott argues that the infant and child hallucinates, plays with illusion. Playing, then, for Winnicott, is universal; in response to the absence of the goodenough mother, the baby develops the ability to play. In this sense, playing is universal and the foundation of health. The intersubjectivity of the child’s gesture and the mother’s recognition breaks down oppositions between self and other, mind and body, inner and outer worlds, understood psychoanalytically as the product of “splitting”. In contrast, Winnicott argues, if the mother isn't "good-enough", and, in so many of his clinical examples, the not-good-enough mother is a !13 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com depressed mother, the infant complies with the mother's attempts to meet her own needs through the way she relates to the child, "the infant gets seduced into a compliance". Winnicott theorises the compliant, socially useful False Self as a defence against anxiety, a splitting that produces an impoverished, False Self, unable to play or create. In many science fiction stories Fake People are made in factories, robots or replicants. However, in real life, Fake People are the children of dead mothers, in Green's words, a "mother who remains alive but is, so to speak, psychically dead in the eyes of the young child in her care." Green, André, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism p. 170). This severely depressed mother is not able to sustain the child in the illusion of omnipotence. Her behaviour, Green argues, "constitutes a premature disillusionment, and ... it carries in its wake, besides the loss of love, the loss of meaning” (Green, André, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism p. 178).The world the precociously disillusioned child lives in becomes prematurely postmodern. The young child "interprets this", as Green explains, "as the consequence of his drives toward the object.” We can speculate, then, that Winnicott's relation to his depressed, "dead" mother was the source of his impotence. Drive satisfaction was associated with loss of meaning and, later, with his fear of madness. Rather than developing an Oedipal (homo)sexuality, in which a boy's identification with his mother leads to same-sex desire, the association of drive satisfaction with loss of meaning and fear of madness led Winnicott to identify with femininity as maternity, and to have a strongly pre-Oedipal sexuality, associated, for him, with loss of meaning and fear of madness. Non-sexual responses to sexual desire and frustration were thus of great importance to him, in his life and in his work. One key difference between Freud's theory of sublimation and Winnicott's theory of play and transitionality, for Green, is that in drive satisfaction, according to Freud, a discharge exhausts tension and the object is consumed. The transitional object, however, survives; it is, in Winnicott's !14 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com terms, "used"; use rests on survival of the object. As Green points out, "What concerns us here is the creation of a new category of objects, different from internal or external objects” (André Green,The Work of the Negative, p. 236, Green's italics). Alluding to Freud's analysis of Leonardo da Vinci, Green argues that both sublimation and transitionality are examples of the "objectalising function". Green draws here on Bion’s account of “Functions”, modes of thought or logic that apply to, operate on, and construct both subject and object; “mind” and “body”. Bion and Green go beyond Freud here. Rather than opposing Primary and Secondary Processes (the “logic” of what has often been called “irrational” thoughts and the logic of “reason”, logos) “Functions” cover both Primary and Secondary processes without privileging logos as thought. According to Green "the main function of the life or love drives is to establish links with objects and, in order to do this, it is necessary to transform into an object (of the ego), not only that which derives from the relation to primary objects by metonymic extension, but also ... a category or a function.” (Green, The Work of the Negative, p. 237). Thus, for Leonardo, the "drive of investigation (object of flight)” can become objectalised, as seen in the dream of the kite's tail, as seen in Leonardo's scientific inventions, and as seen in his art. The "death drive", in contrast, for Green,"disobjectalises": decathecting and hollowing-out objects and making them meaningless. Green distinguishes between negativity, which, as in Hegelian or Marxist dialectic, is productive, and nullity or blankness, which is a form of disobjectalisation. The boy who played with string, the uncanny, the Christ fantasy: The archive (Winnicott’s writings published in his lifetime, those published posthumously, and those readable in the Welcome Library collections) can be interpreted for traces of Winnicott's fantasm and object relations (unbarred Other, the object of primary masochism, barred, inconsistant Other, in relation to which the subject becomes divided, and object-little-a, the object cause of !15 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com desire, absent and throwing us into humanity). We can read traces of Winnicott’s responses to patients' homosexual transference, patients' heterosexual transference, and his own homo-and hetero- counter-transferences in the archive. Let us start with a patient of Winnicott's, the boy who played with string. Winnicott writes: It is not difficult to guess, however, that he has a maternal identification based on his own insecurity with his relation to his mother, and that this could develop into homosexuality. In the same way the preoccupation with string could develop into a perversion......In this particular case it is possible to detect abnormality creeping into the boy's use of string, and it is important to find a way of stating the change which might lead to its use being perverted. (D.W. Winnicott, “String: A technique of interpretation”, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, London, Hogarth Press, 1965; London, Karnac Books, 1990, 153-157) The boy identifies with his mother and takes her place, playing with dolls he calls his children. He hides the dolls from visitors. We could make much of this hiding; we could invoke ‘the closet’ and give a queer theory reading, drawing on Eve Sedgwick's work.xiv However, Winnicott passes over this detail; what he focuses on in the sentence above is uncertainty: “guess”, “could”. Homosexuality is a possible development. Winnicott’s interpretation and theorisation posit a barred, inconsistent Other. However, there is still something apposite my association—in a queer theorist’s association—with Eve Sedgwick's closet. The closet, according to Sedgewick, is structured like Freud's Unheimlich.xv Is there something uncanny about the case of the boy who played with string? Note Winnicott’s expression: “abnormality creeping”. String is manifest; homosexuality as uncanny is occluded. The signifier “homosexuality” and the signifier “perverted” occur in parallel locations, so perhaps homosexuality is perversion, or only with some uses of string; it is important to find a way of stating the change. So, in contrast to many Lacanian arguments which end by emphasising uncertainty and ascribe this uncertainty to the position of the analyst-writer, the uncertainty here, in Winnicott's argument and in mine, lies in the uncanny object of analysis. Undermining the analyst's position as one of uncertainty is only a polite fiction; emphasising undecidability rather than !16 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com uncertainty leaves the door open for a decision of writingxvi. What is the scope of my interpretation of the imbrication of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘uncertainty’ in Winnicott’s presentation of the case of the boy who played with string? Am I making psychoanalytic or historical claims, or, perhaps, claims about the impossibility of deciding on scope? In either case, it is important to determine if something of note is hapax or if there are more than one example. So, what else does Winnicott say about homosexuality? Reading Winnicott's longest case history, Holding and Interpretation (London, Karnac Books, 1986), we find that each time he attempted to analyse his patient's homosexual transference, the patient fell asleep. The symptom the patient presented with was boringness—he even bored himself. He had no friends. His wife didn't like sex; Winnicott analysed her as the imaginary phallus, impenetrable and detached from the body like the graffito. He also had a girlfriend; Winnicott analysed her as Fenichel's girl-phallus.xvii The patient became more and more frightened and more and more sleepy; eventually Winnicott said, “I love you”, now the patient was sound asleep. Winnicott was trying to contain the patient's fear but the patient retreated, acting in the real by refusing to accede to the symbolic in which he would have been placed, if he had heard and responded to Winnicott's interpretation. The patient slept; when he woke he said he was coming to terms with his schizophrenia. There were long gaps in which the patient was not in analysis. Winnicott wrote a few times to the man's mother, asking if he was all right. After the last letter to the mother, the man wrote back himself, saying his mother had died and sounding very rational. The archive of unpublished material in the Wellcome Library collection contains letters from patients; often expressing affection. A number of letters are from a gay ex-patient who seems to have had a crush on Winnicott. The patient continues to write at intervals; Winnicott advises him to resume analysis. Winnicott's tone is guardedly friendly, professional.xviii In contrast, there are !17 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com three notes from a woman, (the third of which I identified), the mother of an autistic boy who was a patient of Winnicott's.xix She was an intelligent, cultured woman who would recommend interesting exhibitions or articles to Winnicott. This correspondent also has a crush; she tried to hug Winnicott. In a letter in which she asks Winnicott, not for the first time, if they could meet “woman to man” to discuss and move beyond the the awkwardness consequent upon her attempt to hug him; she quotes his response to the attempted hug, “You can't get me that way.” Whether she heard what he didn't speak or what he did speak, and whether this was an abrupt and strongly worded interpretation or an extra-analytic self-revealing remark, what Winnicott is avoiding seems to be more heterosexuality than homosexuality. For another example, referring to material published by another scholar and so with a namable referent in the public domain, let us consider Winnicott’s correspondence with Marion Milner. In a personal letter, Milner praises Winnicott’s “brutality” and asks him for clarification of what she found a confusing attempt to set boundaries for their relationship, offering her love but never sex (in the end, Milner found a relationship with a man, one that included sex as well as love).xx This, we can say, was Winnicott’s fantasm: a desire to be loved by women, and —what? from men. Considered as a biographical question, what he wanted from men is irrelevant; mere gossip. However, from a psychoanalytic and historical point of view, Winnicott's fantasm matters. We can recover something of Winnicott's personal history and the history of the time in which he lived and we can produce an argument that counts, for psychoanalytic writing and for historical writing. The examples are trivial, to do with everyday interactions. But, this is the raw matter of history; these are the traces of what passed by. In the last section of this paper, I discuss a historically significant example: a memo Winnicott addressed to the Wolfenden Commission, arguing strongly for the complete decriminalisation of homosexuality. !18 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com However, to continue with this middle section of my paper, about the everyday examples from the archive, the everyday matters, historially and psychically. Moreover, even if Winnicott’s case notes were available to scholars, the material they contain is likely to be as much in need of speculative interpretation as the less-confidential material. For example, when Winnicott was recovering from one of his heart attacks, he asked a colleague to cover his patients. When the analyst consulted the file on a particular boy, all he found was, “the mother wears purple trousers.”xxi What seems trivial is a nugget, something condensed, something that when unpacked turns out to be significant for an analysis, whether personal or historical. For Winnicott, who considered psychic structures as continuua, and who thought of those continuua diachronically, there is always the fear that a disturbing symptom could be an index of regression to either psychosis or perversion. This is a linear way of thinking the time of the symptom. The fear of regression is an anxiety characteristic of linear ways of thinking about temporality. Perhaps, then, a figure for non-linear temporality as expressed in the symptom may help to suggest ways of thinking psychoanalysis loopily: with eccentric import, non-normatively. I will start with the general structure of Winnicott's symptom: We have the trauma, for Winnicott: he says that he believes his mother weaned him early because of her fear of her own excitement.xxii Thus, we know that Winnicott’s symptom, his fantasm, starts as a variant of what Andre Green called the “Dead Mother Complex”.xxiii In Winnicott’s language, he became the Caretaker Child, identifying with his cold mother and taking on the maternal role.xxiv In response to maternal coldness Winnicott, considers, nachträglich, that he becoomes a caretaker, a nurturer; taking his mother’s place. We also have traces of the later scene, apparently ordinary or trivial, that, for Winnicott, provokes this ‘afterwardness’. He discusses children’s play being stopped when they grow too excited, “if when a child is playing the physical excitement of instinctual involvement becomes !19 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com evident, then the playing stops, or is at any rate spoiled.”(Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, London and New York: Routledge, 2005 © Tavistock Books, 1971, 53). The reference is a late one, a 1968 article drawn upon in Playing and Reality, a collection of essays prepared shortly before Winnicott's death and aimed at a wide audience. In Winnicott's case, these two encounters interact in afterwardsness as masochism, (see, for example, Freud’s essay, “A Child is Being Beaten”xxv) However, contrary to Freud and Laplanche, Winnicott argues that masochism arises as a consequence of sexual frustration, (in the example quoted above, play that is stopped by the mother). Frustration, he argues in his paper on impotence, leads to perverse fantasy. The masochism and caretaking combine with images from Winnicott’s Christian heritage, constructing a Christ fantasm, as we can see in Winnicott’s poem, “The Tree”, in the matchstick crosses made in their analytic sessions and given to Marion Milner, and as we can see in the correspondence.xxvi Read in this way, as ‘afterwardsness’, Winnicott's claim that frustration is the cause of perversion makes sense. One may speculate, reading as analyst, that Winnicott, the child whose mother stopped him playing when he became excited, identifies with his mother, she who stopped breast-feeding him when she became too excited. Identifying with his cold mother, he becomes Christ on the Tree, he gives matchstick crosses to Marion Milner in place of the sex for which she asked; and he hides in professionalism from a man who came out to him in a discussion of the very same masochistic, homosexual Christ fantasm in which his jouissance lay. The traces of this fantasm are not difficult to find. Winnicott is not just any case: he was a remarkable analyst and writer, and really, there is no reason to believe that he might not have reached the ‘end of analysis’. A closeted gay analyst, given this prejudicial culture, might well have concealed his homosexuality masquerading as an ‘incompletely analysed’ subject. The masochism Winnicott discloses could have been truth-telling intended to provoke change in his analytic community and discourse. !20 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com ‘Madness’ and whimsy: So, let us examine a few passages where Winnicott discusses “madness” and hallucination. These passages are remarkably whimsical. In each example, Winnicott adverts to his own “mad” behaviour, sometimes he’d look at someone and see someone else in his place. Here are three examples, one from a published paper, two from the correspondence:xxvii The thing that struck me on this Friday was that the patient was talking about penis envy. … I said to him, “I am listening to a girl. I know perfectly well that you are a man but I am listening to a girl, and I am talking to a girl. I am telling this girl, ‘you are talking about penis envy’. ...After a pause, the patient said, ‘If I were to tell someone about this girl I would be called mad.’ ...It was my next remark that surprised me and that clinched the matter, ‘it was not that you told this to anyone; it is I who see the girl and hear a girl talking, when actually there is a man on my couch. The mad person is myself.’ (Psychoanalytic Explorations, “On the Split Off Male and Female Elements”) Both he and the patient are afraid that someone is hallucinating—the patient or the analyst. Suprisingly, Winnicott’s interpretation, in the session, is that the madness is the analyst's, not the patient's. The patient is splititng and projecting. Winnicott receives the projective identificationsxxviii . He sees a girl, there on the couch. Winnicott uses the signifier “elements” (not hapax; it is used in the title and in later passages) to rework Kleinian theory: projective identification becomes the madness of the analyst and splitting becomes recombinatory gender ‘elements’. So, what kind of ‘madness’ is this ‘hallucination’? Is it psychosis? Or is it hysterical hallucination? Or is it a third possibility? When Winnicott says, I see a girl when I know there is a man on my couch, what he is doing is playing, and what he is playing with is a Transitional Object, a fetish. The man is a man and a girl; Winnicott and the analysand are playing with the denying of sexual difference. This is not foreclosure and it is not repression, it is denial, disavowal, Verleugnung. However, if it is playing, done in transitional space, then it is not a separate structure, it is a general human capability. !21 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Let us examine two more examples of Winnicott’s ‘madness’. Both involve apologies to colleagues. In one example, Winnicott looks at a colleague and is rude to him because, he says, he sees someone else in his place. Winnicott could be very funny, and there's something of the mechanism of a joke, but the cruelty is more blatant than in Freud's many of the jokes in Freud’s joke book. Winnicott writes to his colleague: I’m terribly sorry I didn’t reply to what you said at the meeting. I looked at you and saw so-and-so in your place. He never has anything interesting to say, so I ignored him. Later I realised it was you, so I’m apologising. The colleague may well have supposed there to be some admixture of condensation with the displacement, an implication that the colleague was also dull. The second analyst-apology is even more interesting. Winnicott looked at this colleague. Instead of him, he saw W. F. Freud. Winnicott apologies for calling this colleague Mr Freud. He’s sorry, he knows now it was not Mr Freud but his correspondent, and actually, he wasn’t thinking of Mr W. F. Freud, he was thinking of Anna Freud and his difficulties with her. Winnicott wrote to Ernest Jones about his analysis with Strachey; he is still upset, years later: DWW to Ernest Jones, 22nd July 1952, [Strachey] did, however, say two or three things that were not interpretations at a time when interpretation was needed. Each one of these has bothered me and at some time or other have come out in an unexpected way. One day, instead of making the interpretation which I can now easily see for myself, about my inhibitions in regard to the reading of Freud, he used the words, ‘after all, the part that you need to read is not very voluminous’. (E. Robert Rodman, editor, The Spontaneous Gesture, Selected Letters of DW Winnicott, London, Karnac Books, 1987, 33). The Kleinian cliché about inhibitions in reading is less productive, potentially, than the “not-voluminous” interpretation that Strachey offered and from which Winnicott shied away. Winnicott overcome the “inhibition” in reading the “not-voluminous” Freud (24 volumes in the Standard Edition) by reading Freud in chronological order while he was convalescing from his heart !22 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com attacks.xxix What was he angry at Anna Freud about? Her course, in which, he says, she did not ‑ teach Freud in chronological order. The two pathways through the Oedipus co-act for the Other (feminine) subject. Winnicott’s rivalry with the father is at the same time a rivalry with the mother; Freud’s writings, to Strachey, are voluminous, a receptacle; feminine, not masculine. Is this ‘voluminous’ trope Winnicott's signifier, or was it imposed by Strachey? ‘Countertransference’ can be accurate or misleading. Perhaps Strachey caught the train of thought in Winnicott’s unconscious, and it was a coat: those, too, can be voluminous. Masud Khan, the mad analyst who was one of Winnicott’s analysands, says the one time he reached his “true self” was in an uninterpreted encounter in which he got up from the couch and embraced Winnicott, clutching his coat in his hands. (In Rodman, Robert, Winnicott: life and work, (Cambridge MA, Da Capo, 2003). Winnicott talked of ‘true’ and ‘false’ selves; the false self is more compliant, more adaptive. As the self is only part of subjectivity, a false self might, for example, bring the true self to analysis. (Winnicott and Bion discussed this possibility). Winnicott’s silence, not interpreting, was correct analytic practice. Khan was structurally psychotic and one has to be careful when interpreting sexual material to a psychotic; psychotics have a tendency to take such interpretations literally, as a sexual invitation. Winnicott, speaking to Khan, could have framed his interpretation as a construction in terms of love, not sex, as he did to the patient in Holding and Interpretation. However, Winnicott doesn't stop, for this patient, with an interpretation in terms of love, not sex, suitable for work with a psychotic. He takes it further. He makes it explicit that what he is interpreting is same-sex transference, same-sex desire. This patient was “horrified” by his homosexual transference but Winnicott persisted in his interpretations. The patient responded by retreating into sleep. Khan’s story about embracing Winnicott and clutching his coat could be a fantasm and an index of a neurotic or perverse structure or it could be a delusion, and indicative of psychosis. Perhaps that is why Winnicott was silent; metaphorically holding Khan !23 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com in silence. Or perhaps Winnicott was retreating, evading, as he did, for example, to another correspondent, the woman who tried to hug him, the woman who was the mother of an autistic boy patient. As Winnicott believes that psychosis, neurosis, and perversion are continuua, there is always the possibility that moments of what Bion called ‘nameless dread’ will recur. In his 1963 article, “Fear of Breakdown”, Winnicott argues that the breakdown has always already occurred, when a trauma occurs before the young child has acceded to the symbolic and when the mother or primary caregiver is unable to ‘hold’ the child, unable to provide psychic processing for the child. Rather than theorising psychosis as delusion, Winnicott theorises psychosis as the consequence of premature disillusion. As subject and object are constituted as separate by the ‘use’ of an object, that is, the object becomes the object as such when re-found after surviving the child's attack, this object is, in Lacanese, symbolic, or in Bionian, the not-breast. With “use of an object” the subject accedes to the symbolic. Winnicott's useable object is, when ‘big Object’, barred A, and when little object, Lacan's object little a, the object cause of desire, that which has dropped, which has been let fall. Part three. Trends, traits, and bare identification. The archive contains many letters written by individuals, often professionals, who did not know Winnicott but who had heard him speak on the radio. A number of these letters are on sexual topics, from contraception to homosexuality. Winnicott was extremely liberal in his advice to correspondents about homosexuality; he told one woman doctor at a children’s home that her colleague was “barbaric” and he gave her sensible and kind advice for dealing with a troubled boy.xxx The boy soiled his bed; he had had a sexual relationship with an older boy and Winnicott's !24 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com correspondent responded by separating the boys and telling him to wash his sheets himself. Winnicott tells his correspondent that the boy should not wash the sheets himself; he would interpret that as a punishment. “In fact”, Winnicott writes, this boy “should not be punished for anything.”xxxi Winnicott's correspondent asks if anal intercourse could have caused ‘anaesthesia’, ‑ causing the boy to soil his bed. Winnicott, in response, alludes to anal desire. From the tone of the correspondence it appears that the correspondent and Winnicott thought the boys' relationship had most likely been consensual. The correspondent's “barbaric” colleague (Winnicott's adjective) suggested injections of testosterone. Winnicott is forthright in supporting her against this colleague; he is also a supporter of the boy: don't punish him; encourage anything likeable, perhaps he has artistic tendencies or likes nice materials (D.W.W's signifiers). There are two highly characteristic rhetorical moves, here. Firstly, the progression from ‘he may think washing sheets is a punishment’ to ‘in fact, don't punish him for anything’. Winnicott is apt to focus on a particular instance of punishment and to imply, without stating it explicitly, that punishment is in general, wrong. Thus, for example, Wolfenden interpreted Winnicott's Memo to the Wolfenden Commission, quite correctly, as an argument for absolute liberty. The second rhetorical move, a condensation of artistic tendencies, ‘nice materials’, and ‘likeableness’ is also characteristic of Winnicott. The archive contains notes Winnicott sent to a colleague in hospital offering to bring her an attractive cup and saucer; he said he couldn't stand drinking from the ugly, clunky hospital ware when he was convalescing. Winnicott says that the analysis with Strachey enabled him to “see babies as persons”, that is, consolidated the maternal identity, but there were things left unanalysed. He mentions one: his rivalry with Freud, the ‘father of psychoanalysis’.xxxii For a man, one might think this would be relatively straightforward—ego ideal. But D.W.W., like James Strachey, identifies as feminine and his relation to the paternal ego-ideal is from a feminine, not-All position. As his rivalries with !25 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Melanie Klein and with Anna Freud illustrate, the straightforward ego-ideal rivalry-andidentification is with feminine figures, not masculine. So, for the Winnicott and Strachey analytical relationship, Winnicott's rivalry with Freud is expressed in tropes that turn on gender crossidentification. Thus, as I discussed in the previous section, Freud's writings are “not too voluminous” (DWW letter to Jones, in The Spontaneous Gesture), a big, feminine space, not an erect masculine figure. Joan Riviere, Winnicott’s second analyst, writes in a letter to Winnicott in response to one in which he told her of his ”sunflower dream” that, while she was happy for him that he felt this dream showed he was ready for happiness in a new relationship (with Clare Britton), she still felt he had, as shown in this dream, problems with relations between inside and outside.xxxiii That is, Riviere gives a Kleinian interpretation of Winnicott's dream, using that Kleinian interpretation to imply that she feels that Winnicott still may have sexual problems, legible in this dream, despite his anticipation of a happy relationship with a woman, Clare Britton. Kleinian phantasy is intrapsychic. Lacanian RSI and the Borromean knots are not intrapsychic. Lacan's work is post-Husserlian; a response to phenomenological philosophy. It raises questions about objectalisation as well as subjectivation. With Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, as has often been remarked, Winnicott was deeply rivalrous. What, though, to end with Strachey’s question, of Winnicott’s rivalry with the father? The imbrication of the relation to the father and to the Law in Freud's invented myth of the sons' murder and eating of the Archaic Father are a good place to end with, a place to find traces of intentionality and to begin to sketch out a way of disentangling the historical from the structural. Winnicott and a colleague at Paddington Green sent a Memo, in 1955, to the 1957 Wolfenden Commission on Homosexuality and the Law.xxxiv Winnicott and his colleague ‑ discussed the need to frame their Memo in a way that would make it effective, that would persuade !26 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com the Wolfenden Commission to liberalise the law on homosexuality. In the last paragraph, though, Winnicott uses the word “vengeance”; a word clearly not chosen to persuade possibly illiberal committee members. Winnicott’s collaborator wrote a marginal note to the secretary who typed the Memo: he’d queried the word, “avenging”; did Winnicott really send in this version, with this word? The Wolfenden Report comments in paragraph 33 that Some psychiatrists have made the point that homosexual behaviour in some cases may be compulsive.....Even if immunity from penal sanctions on such grounds were claimed or granted, nevertheless preventative measures would have to be taken for the sake of society at large. (Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Cmnd. 247. H.M.S.O., London, Paragraph 33) Winnicott is suggesting that what is at stake, for ‘society’, is is not protection but vengeance. This is a Lacanian understanding of the Law applied to the example of the actual law, the law of the country, understood in terms of unconscious desires that are traceable back to Freud's myth of the murder of the archaic father. In the Memo, Winnicott starts with “normal homosexuality”, described in non-narrative terms: “...normal homosexuality. When the family setting is good, small children can afford to explore all trends whether active or passive, male or female, sadistic or masochistic, etc., etc.” This non-narrative theory about “trends” is Winnicott's first theory of homosexuality. It's Freudian, based on Freud's notion of childhood polymorphous perversity. What Winnicott calls trends, we can argue, are what Lacan calls unary traits, bare identifications, not identities.xxxv These, says Winnicott, are ‑ more historically specific and fixed than bare traits; they are compulsive and lead to “arrest”. Arrest, that is, by the police, so perhaps these are no more compulsive than the traits. Winnicott and his correspondent are producing an argument along two lines, here: firstly, they posit a ‘normal’ homosexuality, described in non-narrative terms as unary trait rather than identity. They argue that a homosexuality based, like any sexuality, on trends or a unary trait, is not “expected” to “bring the child to a clash with the law, either as a child or later as a man”. In fact, !27 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com under current law, it often did; Winnicott's “is not expected” is metonymic; in the place of an explicit critique that Winnicott does not pose. Then, Winnicott and the Paddington Green colleague describe the homosexualities that do bring about a “clash” with the law. These are “compulsive”; psychically caused, so legal retaliation is unwarranted. Or, perhaps, if my pun on arrest is also Winnicott's, they are compulsive and notcompulsive, fixed as identity and unfixable as identification: trait, trend, trace. One homosexuality that might lead to “arrest” is a sexuality in which “sexual practice in relation to the mother...is unthinkable, and the only chance for sexual experience is along homosexual lines.” Unlike Kohut, who argues that the boy turns from his inadequate mother to his father for a second chance at mothering, Winnicott argues in more Lacanian terms that the boy “remains attached” to his mother but heterosexual practice is “unthinkable”; the foreclosure of heterosexuality due to the adhesive maternal relation leads to homosexuality.xxxvi Winnicott's ‑ comment on treatment is typically wry, “the mother is unlikely to be co-operative.” Another homosexuality, like Lacan's analysis of Schreber in the Third Seminar, starts with the debated causal link between homosexuality and paranoia. Winnicott argues, based on experience with patients, that if there is a causal link, it is paranoia that is the cause and homosexuality that is a possible effect: “The ‘paranoid’ (expected persecution) anxieties can be intolerable. One of the ways these patients seek relief is through sodomy. In sodomy the persecutory element (always expected to be catching the patient up from behind) is humanised into a love partner.....The love and trust that can exist between such partners reflects the utter loneliness that belongs to the paranoid illness.” Lacan, in discussing Schreber, rejects the purported causal link and focuses on structure (the psychotic does not accede to the symbolic, refusing the Name of the Father). Winnicott focuses on a particular, vivid image, “always expected to be catching up from behind”. As so often in !28 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Winnicott's writing, the effect is of a quotation, perhaps the patient's phrase, perhaps Winnicott's interpretation, in either case a written inscription of analytic speech. It's a condensation; paranoia and sodomy in the same image. Causation recedes, to be replaced by a patient's unconscious desires as spoken in analysis. These vivid phrases are not generic illustrations of a writer's argument.They are particulars, examples of what Winnicott or his patient said, readable for the half-said, the rhetorical swerve, the unfixing of sense. Early in the Memo, in Winnicott's paragraph 4, he takes the argument about unconscious desires even further. He writes, “on investigation of cases of homosexual assault there is in nearly every case a trend in the child assaulted that is in fact responsible for the assault. ….There is in fact a type of ill child who is ready to be seduced or assaulted-(and this applies also to ordinary heterosexual assault).” This argument had been suggested by his Paddington Green colleague in a note to Winnicott, “4. Uninvited episodes seldom occur—cf it takes two to make a quarrel.” The Wolfenden Report studied and recommended a change in the law on “homosexual offences”; these offences pertained to “buggery” and “homosexual assault”, the scope of which were horribly overextended and exceeded even further in practice than in definition. There was no category, under law, for consensual homosexual practices; police acted as flirty fishers and coerced men who responded into naming names, often of partners from years before. Winnicott's colleague was arguing that few of the cases that were categorised under current law and practice as “assault” were assault. Winnicott's point was different; an assaulted child's unconscious desires are relevant. Moreover, in this passage, as in his list of the multiple ‘trends’ that make up ‘normality’, Winnicott's formulation is closer to Lacan's unary trait, to bare identification, than to identity. Winnicott argues, whether or not one could argue that a particular case might be assault, it is the unconscious desires of the assaulted or consensually participating boy or girl that are central. !29 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Winnicott, by pointing out that an assaulted child has unconscious desires that may make him “ready to be seduced or assaulted”, “responsible”, amounts therefore, (as Wolfenden points out, in an anonymised reference to Winnicott's Memo) to an argument for absolute liberty. No sexual offence should be punished. This “responsibility” would amount to killing the archaic father, and it is this murder to which the “avenging” in Winnicott's phrase, “protecting and avenging the public according to public opinion as it presents at the moment” alludes. Society avenges the murder of the father, even in protecting vulnerable youth. The archaic father is alive and dead, avenging his murder by the band of brothers. The uncanniness is not the closet but the dead/alive father; the superego is unheimlich, when vengeful. Winnicott's use of the word “avenging” surprised his collaborator, “It is possible that DWW changed the word avenging on my suggestion. I only know that I queried it as being the best word.)” As an analyst, Winnicott is not using the word ‘presents’ naively; “public opinion as it presents”, is public opinion as analysand; public opinion as symptom, and the symptom here is the murder and vengeance of the archaic father. Winnicott's word “trend” in “a trend in the child assaulted that is responsible for the assault” (paragraph 4, Memo to Wolfenden) can carry several meanings: perhaps character and fixation, as “There is in fact a type of ill child” might seem to suggest, or perhaps something more bare, an unary trait. Just as in a personal analysis, the analyst listens for another occurrence of a word, or letter; is it a hapax, or does it occur more than once? “Trend”, in paragraph 4, is not a hapax; there are five instances of which I discuss two. Thus, in paragraph 6, we have, “small children can afford to explore all trends whether active or passive, male or female, sadistic or masochistic, etc, etc” (also note the redundancy of “etc, etc”). This is trend as trait, as unary trait, a bare identification. One that is simply, scarcely, that; moving from this, this, this to one, one, one. One, one active, one passive, one male, one female, one sadistic, one masochistic. A type, a !30 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com fixation, of course, is a symptom; a trend, if a trope, is a trace of a symptom; perhaps to do with the subject's fantasm, perhaps an objet petit a, one among many. “Type of ill child” in paragraph 4 thus becomes, retrospectively, uncertain, nachträglich. Winnicott's “trend in the assaulted child that is in fact responsible for the assault”, is thus a call for us to listen to the assaulted patient, speaking trends, traits, traces of that which has passed.xxxvii ‑ Like the two events or scenes that, in nachträglichkeit make up the symptom, like the positive and the negative poles the Other subject traverses in a complex, loopy travel through the Oedipus complex, the murder of the father and the vengeance of the father co-exist. In a theorisation of the symptom, temporality becomes complex and non-linear. Similarly, Freud's invented myth, the murder of the archaic father, must be understood in term of a non-linear, complex temporality. It is the vengeance of the father we see in society, Winnicott claims. In Winnicott's symptom, jouissance, when figuring a relation to the father, is as much to do with death as love. Thus, in this, Winnicott’s most explicit discussion of sexuality, jouissance is also death, murder. Thus, it is the paranoid who fears “something catching up from behind” who uses his behind to unite sex and love, “the love and trust, reflecting”, Winnicott says, “the utter loneliness that belongs to the paranoid illness”, but also the fear of the archaic father's vengeance. Jouissance is to do with death and loneliness, as the relation to the object is formulated as Lack, as negativity, but why is this aspect brought out so strongly in Winnicott’s psyche, in the traces we have? And what does Winnicott do with his fantasm, how does he face it and, in his terms, “use” it? In the archival files, there are a few—only a few—very old letters. The correspondents sound terribly young. They died in World War One; Winnicott writes that he wishes he had died instead. Bibliography SE = The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes, ed. by James !31 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Strachey et al. The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London 1953-74 The Wellcome Collection Library, Winnicott, Donald Woods, 1896-1971, PP/DWW/50 boxes Benjamin, Jessica, Like Subjects, Love Objects, (New Haven, Yale UP 1998) Burgoyne, Bernard“Autisms and Topology”, in Drawing the Soul. edited by Bernard Burgoyne, Rebus Press, 2000 Chernaik, Laura, Social and Virtual Space, (Cranbury New Jersey, Fairleigh Dickinson Press 2005) Eidelsztein, Alfredo, The Graph of Desire, (London, Karnac Books, 2009) Fenichel, Otto, The Collected Papers, First Series (New York, Norton, 1953) Second Series (New York, Norton, 1954) Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, in The Uncanny, The New Penguin Freud, (London, Penguin Books, 2003) Freud, Sigmund SE 1, “A Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895) Freud, Sigmund, SE 17, “A Child is Being Beaten” (1920) Freud, Sigmund, SE 19, “The Ego and the Id” (1923) Freud, Sigmund, SE 23, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) Green, A., Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, (London, Free Association Books, 2001) André Green,The Work of the Negative, (London, Free Association Books,1999) Heath, Stephen, “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade”, in Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, (London, Methuen, 1986) Hill, Phillip HF, Using Lacanian Clinical Technique—an introduction—(London, Press for the Habilitation of Psychoanalysis, 2002) Kohut, Heinz, The Analysis of the Self, (Chicago, U of Chicago Press, 1971; 2013); The Restoration of the Self, (Chicago, U of Chicago Press, 1977; 2009) Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, edited by Bruce Fink, (New York, Norton, 2006) Lacan, Jacques, Seminar IX, Identification, translation of unedited text, www.lacaninireland.com; unedited, typed transcript, http://gaogoa.free.fr/SeminaireS.htm#9 Lacan, Jacques, Seminar X, translation of unedited text, www.lacaninireland.com Lacan, Jacques, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, (New York, Norton, 1977). Lacan, Jacques, Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Translated by Russell Grigg, (New York, Norton, 2007) Lafferty, R.A, Annals of Klepsis, (New York, Ace Books, 1983) Lopez-Corvo, Rafael, Traumatised and Non-Traumatised States of the Personality, London, Karnac Books, 2014 Meisel, Perry, and Walter Kendrick, editors, Bloomsbury/Freud, The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, (New York, Basic Books, 1985) !32 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com Nobus, Dany, and Malcolm Quinn, Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid, (New York, Routledge, 2005) Nobus, Dany, and Lisa Downing, editors, Perversions, Psychoanalytic Perspectives/Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, (London, Karnac Books, 2006) Ragland, Ellie, “Who is Transferring What to Whom”, www.academyanalyticarts.org/ragland.htm Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Cmnd. 247. H.M.S.O., London 1957 Riviere, Joan, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, in The Inner World and Joan Riviere, (London, Karnac Books, 1991) Rodman, E. Robert, editor, The Spontaneous Gesture, Selected Letters of DW Winnicott, (London Karnac Books, 1987) Rodman, E. Robert, Winnicott, life and work, (Cambridge MA, Da Capo Press, 2003) Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley, U of California Press, 1990) Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, (London and New York, Routledge, 2005 © Tavistock Books, 1971) Winnicott, D.W., Holding and Interpretation, (London, Karnac Books, 1986) Winnicott, D.W., The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, (London, Hogarth Press, 1965, London, Karnac Books, 1990) Winnicott, D.W., Psycho-Analytic Explorations, (London, Karnac Books, 1989) i Fantasm, while it is perhaps more common in Spanish or French, is also an English word. Phantasy's connotations are Kleinian. Klein's phantasy is intrapsychic; Winnicott critiqued this. Lacan's late work, RSI and the Borromean knots, is not intrapsychic. That's why I spell fantasy with an f, not a ph. ii Patrick Casement, personal communication; Patrick and his wife Margaret attended Winnicott's seminars. iii For example, Strachey analysed a dream of Winnicott’s in which he had “affectionate passages” with his father and a dream in which his wife in a “bare/bear” skin had a penis, which “popped out” and “castrated him”. iv Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. v However, Bion was as interested in structure as contents. Beta thinking and Alpha thinking are two different processes, structurally different, rather than just temporally prior and subsequent. However, contemporary postKleinians, even rather Bionian ones, still use something to do with time to separate out different structures. So, for example, Rafael Lopez-Corvo, in Traumatised and Non-Traumatised States of the Personality, London, Karnac Books, 2014, argues that nachträglichkeit applies only to the processing of ‘pre-conceptual’ trauma, while ‘conceptual’ trauma is worked on by alpha-function, which he claims supports linear temporality. vi Although 'inversion' is a nineteenth century idea, gender cross identification is still a useful concept. For a Lacanian development of the idea, see, for example, Mandy Merck's discussion of Catherine Millot in Dany Nobus and Lisa Downing's Perversions, Psychoanalytic Perspectives/Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, (London, Karnac Books, 2006). For a feminist object relations version of the argument, see Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects, (New Haven, Yale UP 1998). vii Cross-? Contrary? Not 'opposite', surely. Also, not 'Other' which begs the question. Sex? In English, more biological than gender, which is more cultural and social. Moreover, if discussing the history of sexuality, it gets confusing if 'sex' is used for male/female identities (or other non binaristic gendered identities) and 'sexuality' is used for hetero/ homosexual identities (or other non binaristic sexual identities). Also, the history of sexuality calls into question the purported ahistoricity of biology. !33 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com viii Strachey takes this directly from Freud: “The Ego and the Id”, 1923, SE 19, 372. Most Lacanians posit a connection between Lacan's grid of sexuation and hysteria as a more feminine and obsessional neurosis as a more masculine neurosis, perhaps suggesting that the ‘New Symptoms’ are less like this. Philip Hill, in contrast, suggests, in Using Lacanian Clinical Technique—an introduction—that obsessional neurosis is the dialect that deals with two conflicts while hysteria only deals with one (typically, gender as binary). Obsessional neurosis would be bisexual, not male. ix Roudinesco, Elisabeth, http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number15/roudinesco.htm x See Rodman, Robert, Winnicott: life and work, Da Capo Press, 101-102 xi Riviere, Joan, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, in The Inner World and Joan Riviere, (London, Karnac Books, 1991); Heath, Stephen, Joan Riviere and the Masquerade, in Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, (London, Methuen, 1986) xii PP/DWW/B/A/12 xiii In CFAR seminar, 2013 Sedgwick,Eve Kosovsky, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley, U of California Press, 1990). xiv xv Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny”, in The Uncanny, The New Penguin Freud, (London, Penguin Books, 2003). xvi I am mixing Derrida and Lacan here. See my Social and Virtual Space, Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2005, for a discussion of Derridian undecidability and decision of writing and how it can be combined with more Lacanian approaches. For a good example of more strictly Lacanian argument that ends with gestures towards indetermination and unknowing, see, for example, Nobus and Quinn Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid, (New York, Routledge, 2005) xvii Fenichel, Otto, The Collected Papers, First Series (New York, Norton,1953,) Second Series (New York, Norton, 1954). Essay No. 20 in First Series and No. 1 in Second Series. xviii PP/DWW/B/A/6 xix PP/DWW/B/A/1 xx PP/DWW/B/A/21 xxi Patrick Casement, personal communication. xxii Rodman, Robert, Winnicott: life and work, (Cambridge MA, Da Capo, 2003) 14 and note 18; Marion Milner was Rodman's source. xxiii xxiv Green, A., Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, (London: Free Association Books, 2001). Winnicott, DW, “Ego Distortion in terms of true and false self”, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Karnac Books 1965). xxv Freud, S., “A Child is Being Beaten”, SE 17. xxvi Rodman, Robert, Winnicott: life and work, (Cambridge MA, Da Capo Lifelong, 2003. PP/DWW/B/A/6; PP/DWW/B/A/31 xxvii A Lacanian analyst who read an early draft of this paper thought that ‘elements’ was weird and out of date. However, Lopez-Corvo uses this term; Post-Kleinians still use this language. xxviii !xxix xxx P/DWW/B/A/4 ! xxxi xxxii Rodman, Robert, Winnicott: life and work, (Cambridge MA, Da Capo Lifelong, 2003. See above, P/DWW/B/A/4 DWW on DWW in Winnicott, D.W., Psycho-Analytic Explorations, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). !34 Nachträglichkeit: afterwardsness in the correspondence and writings of DW Winnicott Dr Laura Chernaik laura.chernaik@gmail.com xxxiii ! xxxiv PP/DWW/B/A/25 DWW/PP/B/A/28 xxxv ! Lacan, Jacques, Seminar IX; Seminar XVII. I argue that all three identifications are contingent and thus historical. The discourse of the hysteric –the four discourses, if one theorises a structure-- is one of those rare revolutions in thought mostly dependent on one man, Freud, and thus contingent; the identification with the father that brings with it access to the Symbolic is access to our contingent Symbolic, not some other Symbolic, otherwise, elsewhen, elsewhere; and the unary trait is quintessentially contingent. xxxvi ! Kohut, Heinz, U of Chicago Press; The Analysis of the Self, (Chicago, U of Chicago Press,1971; 2013); The Restoration of the Self, (Chicago, U of Chicago Press, 1977; 2009) !xxxvii In the recent cases of child abuse, in which inconceivable numbers of children were abused and ignored, the abused children were not listened to. Winnicott's argument is shocking to modern ears, but he is not saying that abuse is rare. He is saying that we should listen to vulnerable children and that vulnerable children need therapy, not discipline, and abusers also need therapy, not locking up.