feedback loop

January 6th, 2011

I’ve been doing a lot of research on the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott for the book I’m working on. At one point I searched online for any possible video footage there might be of him, and didn’t find anything. Recently I checked again, and saw that a short video I posted about my cat came up in the search.

Then I noticed the first link, to an audio clip of Winnicott. I followed it, but had a great deal of trouble trying to get the .wmv file to play on my mac. (Thank you to our kind blog monitor Mentor for finding the hidden links that enabled me to finally hear it.)

I don’t know where or when the recording was made, but it was probably some time in the mid-sixties. It’s weird that there’s not more audio available of Winnicott because he did many BBC broadcasts about child psychology in the 40s and 50s but of course it was much more difficult to record stuff then. And possibly because they were talks about mothers and babies and not war or the economy, no one considered them worth preserving.

Anyhow, after years of reading about him and reading his work, it was very exciting to hear his voice.