ABSTRACT
Many years ago, one of my former teachers, the distinguished child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr Susanna Isaacs Elmhirst (1996), told me a lovely and little known story about two of her mentors, Dr Wilfred Bion, her former supervisor, and Dr Donald Winnicott, whom she succeeded as head of the psychology department at the Padding-ton Green Children’s Hospital in London. Elmhirst reminisced about a meeting at the British Psychoanalytical Society when Winnicott discussed the intensity of undertaking psychoanalytical work and, in his characteristic literary fashion, he referred to the “white heat” of the consulting room as a revealing metaphor for what transpires therein. Although Winnicott and Bion rarely saw eye to eye, it seems that on this occasion Bion agreed with Winnicott wholeheartedly, and both men came to use this phrase—“white heat”—as an evocative descriptor of our work.
