Winnicott, Clare

Talks, notes and draft publications on child care, social work, and psychoanalysis from the 1950s and 1960s. The collection consists largely of material relating to her work in the Child Care Service, both practical questions and broader theoretical issues.

1940s-1980

2 boxes

These papers were not in any particular order, and so have been arranged as follows. There are a few of CW's published papers, several major lectures or conference papers, and then material grouped loosely by subject matter. This has been organised with any relatively polished holograph or typescript papers, where these exist, preceding a file of rough outlines of lectures, stray pages, notes, ephemera, etc. The collection includes a handful of papers by DWW (several inscribed to CW) and some writings by her about him.

This small group of her papers was received from Andrew Britton (CW's nephew) via the late Madeleine Davis (1932-1991), editor of DWW's posthumous works, in 1991.

Clare Britton trained as a psychiatric social worker and met Donald Woods Winnicott (DWW) (1896-1971), the eminent paediatrician and psychoanalyst, while she was working with disturbed evacuated children in Oxfordshire and DWW was Consultant Psychiatrist to the Government Evacuation Scheme during the Second World War. In 1947 she was appointed to take charge of the first training course for social workers in child care at the London School of Economics. She married DWW in 1951, following the dissolution of his first marriage. From 1964 to 1971 she was at the Home Office as Director of Child Care Studies, and received the OBE. In retirement she continued work as a psychoanalyst.

The Archives and Manuscripts Department holds a collection of Donald Winnicott's papers (PP/DWW), but a significant proportion of his papers are held by the New York-Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY 10021, USA.

Duplicate material was weeded.