During a series of lectures for passion week, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, opened up about his mental health. In confessing how he had long relied on antidepressants to “restore me to Eeyore status from something much worse”, he noted how his predecessor, Dr Rowan Williams, once advised him “there is almost no human situation that cannot be explained with the hermeneutical tools of Winnie the Pooh”. Certain psychologists have, in recent years, concurred with this observation, writing academic papers on how the characters in the Hundred Acre Wood are expressions of disorders: Tigger suffers from ADHD, Rabbit is a narcissist, Piglet has an anxiety complex and Pooh displays obsessive compulsive maladies associated with eating honey.
AA Milne himself tended to be dismissive of such readings and certainly would have been amused by the idea of archbishops swapping sermons about his nursery tales. After serving at the Somme, he was not convinced by religion – for all his “hush, hush listen who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”, he never had his son baptised, unpersuaded that he was born in sin.
