Winnicott and Imprisonment

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I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting—

—Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

At first glance, Winnicott appears to have very little to say on the topic of imprisonment. There are only a few references to prisons in his writing, and most of those are confined to one unpublished paper, "Comments on the Report of the Committee on Punishment in Prisons and Borstals," written in 1961 and not published until 1984. He has a great deal to say, however, about the ways in which individuals, mainly adolescent males, can end up within the confines of a prison cell if the antisocial behavior they exhibit isn't transformed into constructive or reparative activity by some form of therapeutic intervention.¹ It is possible to hypothesize, therefore, what Winnicott might have written had he written more about imprisonment, especially in terms of some of the spatial metaphors that saturate his writing.

The Antisocial Tendency

Most of what Winnicott knew about the antisocial tendency that might lead someone to end up in a jail he learned from his work with children evacuated from the cities during World War II. In his capacity as Consultant Psychiatrist for the Government Evacuation Scheme in Oxfordshire, which he held from 1939 to 1946, Winnicott had the responsibility for the mental health care of about 285 young children in five different hostels. He visited these hostels once a week for consultations. This allowed him and the teams he worked with to observe closely the behavior of children under the stress of separation from their homes as well as their often bizarre attempts to adapt to their new environment.

Many of the children he worked with were ones whose home lives had been difficult to begin with and who only showed more signs of antisocial behavior after they arrived at the hostels to which they had been assigned. In Clare Winnicott's words, these children "were too disturbed to be placed in ordinary homes" (1983, 2), so they had to be placed in institutions that could offer them a holding environment for the duration of the war. The behavior they exhibited ran the gamut from such minor problems as "bed-wetting and fecal incontinence" to outright criminality, "stealing in gangs, burning of hay-ricks, train wrecking, truancy" (D. W. Winnicott 1947, 56). But some of the children, Winnicott observed, seemed to find it a relief to enter this new environment, an environment that was steady and secure enough for them to act out in various ways.

After the war, Winnicott was also able to counsel parents about the behavior they could expect when their children returned home. Often the children found they could not (in one of Winnicott's more striking spatial images) "fit nicely into the holes they made [in the family] when they went away" (1945, 46). Returning home could be as traumatic as leaving it, "for the simple reason that the hole [had] disappeared," had been filled by someone else. This suggests, as will become clear, that the family itself had once been a kind of container, the kind you can make a "hole" in if you leave, but where you would find no place to fit when you came back, leaving you feeling somehow "empty" yourself.

From a theoretical point of view, the most important fact about this period of Winnicott's career was his association with John Bowlby. In response to an enquiry about his wartime experience, Winnicott recalled in a 1969 letter to his friend Robert Tod, to whose book Disturbed Children (1968) he had contributed a preface:

I became involved in the failure of the evacuation scheme and could therefore no longer avoid the subject of the antisocial tendency. Eventually I became interested in...