In Person & Online

Barbara Dockar Drysdale (1912-1999)

Founder & Director of The Mulberry Bush School, a residential therapeutic school for children.

Consultant to The Cotswold Community

Psychotherapist with the British Association of Psychotherapists.

She established her work with severely disturbed children in the period after the Second World War and out of this emerged a close working relationship with Donald Winnicott, summarised by Mrs Dockar Drysdale in Chapter 1 of The Provision of Primary Experience.

In his Foreword to Therapy and Consultation in child care Winnicott wrote:

“I was excited to find someone who was receptive in an active way. So often one feels: if you don’t know, how can I tell you! Here was someone who knew, and who therefore enriched what she heard.”

Winnicott recognised the shared roots of their understanding of the effects of severe deprivation and appreciated how her formulations and and application of these could help children who may not gain benefit from non-residential psychoanalytic treatment interventions or other forms of intervention. Winnicott also appreciated how her ways of describing the children and the terms she coined for these could make his own theoretical  and clinical formulations more understandable and accessible to a wider audience.

This collaboration between IPCAPA and Squiggle and emerges from discussions about the continuing significance and importance of Barbara Dockar Drysdale’s work for the care and treatment of severely deprived children who can pose major challenges to social welfare, education and mental health services. It will consist of two parts to present key aspects of her work and the links with Winnicott’s theories, and their application to clinical work in residential and non-residential settings.

The presentations will include papers by John Whitwell, (British Psychotherapy Foundation & previously Director of The Cotswold Community) and Adrian Sutton (Director of Squiggle Foundation 2014-25).

Further details will follow.