The Music Therapist in School as Outsider

This essay examines the institutional commonalities among several schools in which I have worked as a music therapist, illustrating how thinking about my role as an outsider has informed my therapeutic approach. I refer to the broader concept of the outsider as it relates to both fictional and historical figures and in particular to Sherly Williams's article 'The Therapist as Outsider: The Truth of the Stranger' (1999) in which she compares the therapist to the archetypal figures of the fool and the seer. Finally, I link these ideas to Winnicott's concept of play, presenting the music therapist's role in school as that of an advocate for fostering creative impulses, which can at times be at odds with (or perhaps complementary to) the central educational aims of the school

Collected Works of D.W.Winnicott

Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) was one of Britain's leading psychoanalysts and paediatricians. The author of some of the most radical propositions in psychoanalysis: transitional space, the capacity for concern, the use of an object, and many more, Winnicott’s work remains of great relevance to 21st century psychoanalysis.

The Psychoanalytic Languages: On the Intimate Rivalry of Michael Balint and D.W. Winnicott

The article presents and discusses a two-decades correspondence between Michael Balint and D.W. Winnicott. Alongside closeness and friendship, the letters reveal tensions, disagreement and even rivalry between Balint and Winnicott on three main levels: personal, cultural and theoretical. The debate can be framed around the question of whether or not the British School of Psychoanalysis that emerged in the 1950s – and in which Winnicott and Balint were arguably the most senior figures – was a continuation of the psychoanalytic tradition that developed before the Second World War by Sandor Ferenczi and the Budapest School. The article argues, however, that there is another meta-theoretical level to the debate between the two: they passionately try to define what is the psychoanalytic language, and disagree about its real nature

Beyond "the Relationship between the Individual and Society": broadening and deepening relational thinking in group analysis

The question of ‘the relationship between the individual and society’ has troubled group analysis since its inception. This paper offers a reading of Foulkes that highlights the emergent, yet evanescent, psychosocial ontology in his writings, and argues for the development of a truly psychosocial group analysis, which moves beyond the individual/society dualism. It argues for a shift towards a language of relationality, and proposes new theoretical resources for such a move from relational sociology, relational psychoanalysis and the ‘matrixial thinking’ of Bracha Ettinger which would broaden and deepen group analytic understandings of relationality

A psychoanalytic concept illustrated: Will, must, may, can — revisiting the survival function of primitive omnipotence

The author explores the linear thread connecting the theory of Freud and Klein, in terms of the central significance of the duality of the life and death instinct and the capacity of the ego to tolerate contact with internal and external reality. Theoretical questions raised by later authors, informed by clinical work with children who have suffered deprivation and trauma in infancy, are then considered. Theoretical ideas are illustrated with reference to observational material of a little boy who suffered deprivation and trauma in infancy. He was first observed in the middle of his first year of life while he was living in foster care, and then later at the age of two years and three months, when he had been living with his adoptive parents for more than a year