Bernanos: The
As Scapegoat
Priest
RAYNER HEPPENSTALL
CERTAIN NOTIONS
that I have entertained for a long time about
the work of Georges Bernanos in particular were crystallised for me
lately when I read the following in a paper by D. W. Winnicott and
Clare Britton on
The
Problem of Homeless Children:
Each child, according to the degree of his distrust, and
according to the degree of his hopelessness about the loss of his
own home (and sometimes his recognition of the inadequacy of
that home while it lasted), is all the time testing the hostel staff
as he would test his own parents. Sometimes he does this direct–
ly, but most of the time he is content to let another child do the
testing for him. An important thing about this testing is that it
is not something that can be achieved and done with. Always
somebody has to be a nuisance. Often one of the staff will say:
'We'd be all right if it weren't for Tommy . .. ,' but in point
of fact the others can only afford to be 'all right' because Tom–
my is being a nuisance, and is proving to them that the home
can stand up to Tommy's testing, and could therefore presum–
ably stand up to their own.
It is curious how the psychological emphasis has shifted off 'repression'
since the war. The feeling of insecurity and a lack of childhood dis–
cipline are now regarded as the chief source of our ills.
If
Dr. Win–
nicott were an army psychiatrist or any kind of official spokesman, I
might be suspicious of
his
emphasis on 'discipline.' But I happen to
know him for a peculiarly disinterested man with no axe to grind.
Not even an anti-Freudian axe. For all the
sep~rate
conclusions to
which his extensive field-work in peace-time and war-time has brought
him, Dr. Winnicott still regards himself as a Freudian and officiates
for the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
His general view is that a child requires to have its original
feeling of infinity closely delimited and its life confined within a
circle.
If
the laws established by a child's parents prove unreliable,
if the child can break them with impunity, the feeling of infinity
becomes an abyss of nothingness and sets up acute distress and indeed
