Sometimes you can catch important things about human nature in apparent incidentals. It’s
well observed that between the ages of around one and twelve, many children manifest a deep
attachment to a stuffed soft object, normally shaped into a bear, a rabbit or – less often
– a penguin. The depth of the relationship can be extraordinary. The child sleeps with
it, talks to it, cries in front of it and tells it things it would never tell anyone
else. What’s truly remarkable is that the animal looks after its owner, addressing him
in a tone of unusual maturity and kindness. It might, in a crisis, urge the child not
to worry and to look forward to better times in the future. But naturally, the animal’s
character is entirely made up. The animal is simply something invented, or brought to
life by one part of the child, in order to look after the other. The English psychoanalyst
Donald Winnicott was the first person to write seriously and with sensitivity about the business
of teddy bears. In a paper from the early 1960s, Winnicott described a boy of six – whose
parents had been deeply abusive to him – becoming very connected to a small animal his grandmother
had given him. Every night, he would have a dialogue with the animal, would hug him
close to his chest and shed a few tears into his stained and greying soft fur. It was his
most precious possession, for which he would have given up everything else. As the boy
summarised the situation to Winnicott: ‘No one else can understand me like bunny can.’
What fascinated Winnicott here was that it was of course the boy who had invented the
rabbit, given him his identity, his voice and his way of addressing him. The boy was
speaking to himself – via the bunny – in a voice filled with an otherwise all too-rarely
present compassion and sympathy. Though it sounds a little odd, speaking to ourselves
is common practice throughout our lives. Often, when we do so, the tone is harsh and punitive.
We upbraid ourselves for being losers, time-wasters or perverts. But, as Winnicott knew, mental
well-being depends on having to hand a repertoire of more gentle, forgiving and hopeful inner
voices. To keep going, there are moments when one side of the mind needs to say to the other
that the criticism is enough: that it understands, that this could happen to anyone, that one
could not have known… It is this kind of indispensable benevolent voice that the child
first starts to rehearse and exercise with the help of a stuffed animal. In adolescence,
animals tend to get put away. They become embarrassing, evoking a vulnerability we’re
keen to escape from. But, to follow Winnicott, if our development has gone well, what was
trialled in the presence of a stuffed animal should continue all of our lives – because,
by definition, we will frequently be let down by the people around us, who won’t be able
to understand us, listen to our griefs and be kind to us in the manner we crave and require.
Every healthy adult should therefore possess a capacity for self-nurture: that is, for
retreating to a safe secluded space and speaking in a tone that’s gentle, encouraging and
infinitely forgiving. That we don’t formally label the understanding self ‘white rabbit’
or ‘yellow bear’ shouldn’t obscure the debt that the nurturing adult self owes to
its earlier embodiment in a furry toy. A good adult life requires us to see the links between
our strengths and our regressive states. Being properly mature demands a gracious accommodation
with what can seem childlike, embarrassing or humiliatingly vulnerable. We should honour
stuffed animals for what they really are: tools to help us on our first steps in the
vital business of knowing how to look after ourselves.