The first Mrs Winnicott and the second Mrs Winnicott: does psychoanalysis facilitate healthy marital choice?

Dr Donald Woods Winnicott, arguably the most famous and influential psychoanalyst since Professor Sigmund Freud, married twice during his lifetime. In 1923, he wed Miss Alice Buxton Taylor, who divorced him after more than a quarter of a century; and eventually, in 1951, he embarked upon a second marriage to Miss Clare Britton, a social worker, with whom he enjoyed a far more stable partnership which lasted until Winnicott's death in 1971. In this essay, based predominantly on the author's hitherto unpublished interviews with members of Donald Winnicott's family and, also, with relations of Alice Winnicott, as well as numerous unpublished archival sources, we reconstruct the nature of these two very different marriages and consider both the conscious and the unconscious attractions which propelled Winnicott towards these two particular women at different phases of his life and during different periods of psychological awareness. Additionally, we examine whether Winnicott's lengthy tenure as a patient undergoing psychoanalysis, initially with James Strachey, and subsequently with Joan Riviere—both students of Sigmund Freud—may have contributed to Winnicott's arguably more considered choice of a second wife