The shadows of waiting and care: on discourses of waiting in the history of the British National Health Service.

Waiting is at the centre of experiences and practices of healthcare. However, we know very little about the relationship between the subjective experiences of patients who wait in and for care, health practitioners who 'prescribe' and manage waiting, and how this relates to broader cultural meanings of waiting. Waiting features heavily in the sociological, managerial, historical and health economics literatures that investigate UK healthcare, but the focus has been on service provision and quality, with waiting (including waiting lists and waiting times) drawn on as a key marker to test the efficiency and affordability of the NHS. In this article, we consider the historical contours of this framing of waiting, and ask what has been lost or occluded through its development. To do so, we review the available discourses in the existing literature on the NHS through a series of 'snapshots' or key moments in its history. Through its negative imprint, we argue that what shadows these discourses is the idea of waiting and care as phenomenological temporal experiences, and time as a practice of care. In response, we begin to trace the intellectual and historical resources available for alternative histories of waiting - materials that might enable scholars to reconstruct some of the complex temporalities of care marginalized in existing accounts of waiting, and which could help reframe both future historical accounts and contemporary debates about waiting in the NHS.

Becoming a peter pan: omnipotence, dependency and the Ferenczian child.

The aim of this paper is to provide a short history of the changes in Ferenczi's concept of early childhood, during the two decade period, 1913-1932. Initially, Ferenczi mainly emphasized children's feelings of omnipotence, which enable them to perceive themselves as strong, independent and capable human beings. By the mid-1920s, however, he felt that his earlier work did not give a good account of what comes after the stage of omnipotence, and that it did not adequately describe the difficulties in the transition from pleasure to reality principles. However, in his Clinical Diary, Ferenczi became fully aware of how fragile and insecure children are, and therefore how dangerous-yet necessary-it is for them to abandon the "stage of omnipotence" and to gain a "sense of reality". For Ferenczi, traumatized children are children who had not been loved in their early childhood, and therefore could not develop the capacity to make the journey from pleasure principle to that of reality. It will be suggested that a paradigmatic example for this kind of child is Peter Pan.