Introduction to 2020 Updates

These new items, the majority letters, derive from three archival sources: the archives of Clifford Scott (1903–1997), held at the National Archive in Ottawa, Canada; the archives of Michael and Enid Balint, held at the University of Essex at Colchester, United Kingdom; and the archives of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. I am grateful for the generous assistance of the archivists in Ottawa, Nigel Cochrane at Essex, Vladimir Melamed in Los Angeles, and Carys Onions for providing letters relating to her own research from the PETT archive in Gloucester. First Gabby Harris and later Dr. Luisa Boada, doctoral students at UCL, acted as research assistants in compiling and converting these additional documents and sorting abstracts and keywords. My thanks for their assistance and those of the Trust. Clifford Scott trained in psychiatry in Canada and came to the United Kingdom in the early 1930s to study neurology and to pursue his interest in psychoanalysis. He was Melanie Klein’s first analytic candidate at the British Society. An active member, briefly holding the positions of assistant editor of the IJPA (1947–1948) and president of the British Society (1953), he was invited to return to Canada in 1954 to take up a position at the university. He became first president of the Canadian Society and assisted in introducing child analysis in North America. He remained in lively communication with friends and colleagues in the United Kingdom until his own death, and he and Winnicott remained friends until the latter’s death. Winnicott himself had briefly consulted with Scott in the 1940s and he saw both Alice Winnicott, Donald’s first wife, and Clare, his second, for analysis. These analyses are both referred to in the letters reproduced here. Theirs was both an intellectual and a personal friendship, and the letters contain many references to areas of common psychoanalytic interest, exchanges of ideas about particular topics, work-related information on conferences, scientific meetings in the British Society, and comments on colleagues and cases. Winnicott’s last letter to Scott, reproduced here, dates from 1970. I was alerted to the existence of the Balint Winnicott correspondence by research undertaken by Dr. Shaul Bar Haim of Essex University, which was published as “The Psychoanalytic Languages: On the Intimate Rivalry of Michael Balint and D. W. Winnicott,” Psychoanalysis and History, April 2019. Professor Ann Oakley provided us with a copy of Winnicott’s letter to her parents, Richard and Kay Titmuss, after they had arranged a consultation for their daughter with him. In addition to these previously unpublished letters, we are fortunate to have two earlier versions of the important paper “Communicating and Not Communicating,” published in 1965 (vol. 6) and in the audio section of the original recordings of the two papers Winnicott gave in Los Angeles in 1962. Thanks to Joe Aguayo of Los Angeles and Vladimir Melamed, the archivist at the New Center, for making these available.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.