Although he founded no school of his own, D. W. Winnicott (1896â1971) is now regarded as one of the most influential contributors to psychoanalysis since Freud. In over forty years of clinical practice, he brought unprecedented skill and intuition to the psychoanalysis of children. This critical new work by Adam Phillips presents the best short introduction to the thought and practice of Winnicott that is currently available.
Winnicottâs work was devoted to the recognition and description of the good mother and the use of the motherâinfant relationship as the model of psychoanalytic treatment. His belief in natural development became a covert critique of overinterpretative methods of psychoanalysis. He combined his idiosyncratic approach to psychoanalysis with a willingness to make his work available to nonspecialist audiences. In this book Winnicott takes his place with Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan as one of the great innovators within the psychoanalytic tradition.
Source: Winnicott â Harvard University Press by @Harvard_Press
Adam Phillips provides an introduction to the life and legacy of British Psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott. Phillips explores Winnicott’s upbringing, work during the war and study as a paediatrician. He also unpacks Winnicott’s movement into psychoanalysis, from his initial discovery of the work of Sigmund Freud via A.A. Brill’s translation of Interpretation of Dreams, analysis by James Strachey and Joan Riviere, how his work relates to, and departs from the influence of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, with his emphasis on the importance of the early mother-infant relationship, concept of the ‘good enough mother’ and true self / false self.
Beyond the general introduction, one of the things that stood out to me was Phillips discussion of influence. This includes literary influences:
Though we can hear something of E. M. Forster, or his near contemporary Stevie Smith, in Winnicottâs writing, there are no comparable echoes of previous psychoanalytic writers. He struggles to conceal the fact that he often writes uneasily in the psychoanalytic tradition, against the grain of its prevailing forms of seriousness and its fantasies of methodical rigour. His writing has its roots in the English romanticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb (and has illuminating parallels, odd though it may seem, with the essays of Emerson and the work of William James). Much of his own work deviates from Freudian metapsychology, and unlike Klein and Anna Freud his work does not derive from specifically identifiable Freudian texts. As previous commentators have remarked: âWinnicott preserves tradition in a curious fashion, largely by distorting it⌠[with] his elusive mode of presentation and his absorption yet transformation of theoretical predecessors.â By recontextualizing crucial terms, he will gloss over their theoretical history. He will describe psychotherapy as a form of playing â âit has to do with two people playing togetherâ â and at the same time express a marked preference for open-ended games in which play is not circumscribed by agreed-upon rules.
Gathering ideas here and there:
Introducing a radically innovatory paper to the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1945, he said:
I shall not first give an historical survey and show the development of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle down to clinical experience, form my own theories, and then, last of all, interest myself to see where I stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any.
And breaking free from others:
Winnicott was beginning to cure himself of Klein.
It was interesting to this about this alongside my Honors thesis exploring the idea of influence within psychoanalytic texts.
All in all, I felt that Phillips’ book ironically represented Winnicott’s effort to find his true self over time.
Marginalia
Introduction
Though we can hear something of E. M. Forster, or his near contemporary Stevie Smith, in Winnicottâs writing, there are no comparable echoes of previous psychoanalytic writers. He struggles to conceal the fact that he often writes uneasily in the psychoanalytic tradition, against the grain of its prevailing forms of seriousness and its fantasies of methodical rigour. His writing has its roots in the English romanticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb (and has illuminating parallels, odd though it may seem, with the essays of Emerson and the work of William James). Much of his own work deviates from Freudian metapsychology, and unlike Klein and Anna Freud his work does not derive from specifically identifiable Freudian texts. As previous commentators have remarked: âWinnicott preserves tradition in a curious fashion, largely by distorting it⌠[with] his elusive mode of presentation and his absorption yet transformation of theoretical predecessors.â By recontextualizing crucial terms, he will gloss over their theoretical history. He will describe psychotherapy as a form of playing â âit has to do with two people playing togetherâ â and at the same time express a marked preference for open-ended games in which play is not circumscribed by agreed-upon rules.
Introducing a radically innovatory paper to the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1945, he said:
I shall not first give an historical survey and show the development of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle down to clinical experience, form my own theories, and then, last of all, interest myself to see where I stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any.
2 History-taking
For Winnicott, explicitly, a change of language is a change of belief.
3 War-time
The question evolving out of Winnicottâs work was: how does a person grow from a state of primitive greed and absolute dependence on the mother to relative autonomy in which he can acknowledge the existence of other people without too much loss of spontaneity and desire â without the false solution of a rigid conviction or a strong leader?
famous footnote: âThrough artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane.â
Psychoanalysis becomes, on the basis of Winnicottâs developmental model, the connecting of dissociated parts of the self and not modifying the repression of instincts.
So development for Winnicott begins with a magical act: the infantâs purely imaginative process of conjuring up a mother he needs.
Though her hatred, presented in tolerable doses, was integral to the childâs development, her depression could be a demand that sabotaged it.
Winnicott was beginning to cure himself of Klein.
He cannot initiate out of his own desire a gesture met by the mother but must always care for her in the hope that he will eventually establish the mother he needs to facilitate his own growth. If the children who have to deal first with their motherâs mood âsucceed in the immediate task, they do no more than succeedâ, Winnicott writes, âin creating an atmosphere in which they can start on their own livesâ.
it is important to realize, by way of conclusion, that during the 1940s Winnicott had evolved a powerful rival developmental theory to those of both Freud and Klein, while including the bits of their work he found useful. He was a pragmatist with an essentialist theory that posited the existence of a True Self that was rooted in the body, of a piece with it, so to speak, but a body without erotic connotation. The drive was not for pleasure but for development, and the foundations of previous psychoanalytic theory â the Unconscious and the Instincts â were subsumed by this project. The infantâs life began not exclusively in conflict but in mutuality; indeed too much conflict distorted natural development. At the earliest stages of development there was, as it were, a rudimentary socialism, a form of life, Winnicott suggests, based on collaborative exchange (or perhaps more exactly, to use Wordsworthâs phrase, âmutual dominationâ). And so by implication, in Winnicottâs new-found terms, there were parts of the Freudian and Kleinian developmental schema that were descriptions, not of ordinary development, in his view, but of the development of what he begins to call a False Self
4 The Appearing Self
The patient, in Winnicottâs terms, is always trying to go somewhere via the analyst. Interpretations are passports.
Winnicott, as usual playing fast and loose with psychoanalytic terminology, suggests that for the infant there are âat first body-needs, and they gradually become ego-needs as a psychology emerges out of the imaginative elaboration of physical experienceâ.6
5 Real-making
By direct analogy psychoanalysis, Winnicott proposes, âis a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seenâ. Like the motherâs long-term tending of her infant and child, psychoanalysis is a âgiving the patient back what the patient bringsâ.
The False Self, an âidea which our patients give usâ, has three functions: it attends, within severe limitations, to the mother; it hides and protects the True Self by complying with environmental demands; and it is also a âcaretakerâ (another âpatientâs wordâ), like a nurse looking after a child, taking over the caring function of the environment that has failed. It is a primitive form of self-sufficiency in the absence of nurture
6 The Play of Interpretation
The act of interpretation, aside from its content, expresses collaborative concern; it comes out of identifying with the patient â being able, to some extent, to imagine what it is like to be that person at that moment â and then the more unexpected consequence of âbelieving inâ what he needs.
For Winnicott the opposite of play is not work but coercion.
Each psychoanalytic theorist, it could be said, organizes his or her theory around what might be called a core catastrophe; for Freud it was castration, for Klein, the triumph of the Death instinct, and for Winnicott it was the annihilation of the core self by intrusion, a failure of the holding environment.
At work, I was (again) challenged by the dilemma of grappling with incidents that have been waiting for traction. A part of a large project,…