Abstract
Alison Bechdel, in her graphic memoir Are You My Mother? describes an impression of a maternal, warm, and cuddly Winnicott that is familiar to most of us: “In my cursory reading, I assumed that Winnicott was a woman. None of the mentions included a pronoun, and the ideas themselves had a nurturing, maternal aspect. Also, though I knew it was a surname, ‘Winnicott’ sounded like a girl’s name. Like ‘Winnie.’ Not that I knew anyone named Winnie, except for Winnie-the-Pooh. Of course, there was some gender ambiguity about Winnie-the-Pooh as well” (2012, p. 55).
Winnicott was a patrician pediatrician who took the real mother seriously, who appreciated that her behavior and even her emotional state, her psychic fortitude, mattered. Yet who, in a sublime act that resulted in at least some relief from the grip of the post-industrial fetishization of the perfect mother, let her know that good enough was, in fact, good enough. He is also often thought of as the genteel, well-bred Brit with the ever present hint of a Buddha smile, a stark contrast with the World War II–era angst of the fierce and often traumatized central European Jews then dominating the analytic elite.
As analysts, however, we are not supposed to be content with unanalyzed transferences. In Winnicott’s case, the idealized maternal transference many of us have to him, his persona, and his brilliant contributions to psychoanalysis has engendered an oversimplification of his theories, many of which he conveyed in plain language that is intuitively understandable and relatable. This transference also leads us to overlook the complexities of his personality, the preponderance of boundary violations in his contact with psychoanalysis on both sides of the couch, and the revolutionary nature of his theories—that is, the aggression, some destructive and toxic yet some coming from a striving to grow.
The Winnicott Tradition goes a long way to dispelling the transferential nature of the fantasies many of us have about Winnicott and his ideas and to helping us work through this transference neurosis of ours. Doing so may help us think not only about ourselves and the ways we situate his theories in our minds and clinical work, but also about the ways that we, as analysts, use our theories to both illuminate and deny uncomfortable and painful truths.
At four hundred pages, The Winnicott Tradition is a significant undertaking, comprising thirty-two papers collected into four sections. The first section, on his life and legacy, is particularly useful in chipping away at the idealized image of Winnicott. It includes several biography-laden chapters, fascinating accounts of his development as a person and as an analytic thinker.
The book starts with the transcript of a recorded speech given by Winnicott’s friend and colleague, Martin James. The speech, which appears to have been extemporaneous, is delightful, charming, and chock full of personal observations of Winnicott and the interpersonal dynamics of the big players in psychoanalysis at the time, as well as eloquent encapsulations of his theories. James succinctly describes, for example, how Winnicott’s view of the manic defense differed from Klein’s, that Winnicott saw the defense as coming from “the actual aliveness of the infant, which denies the actual deadness of response which it had [and] is currently encountering from the mother” (p. 10). He also lets us in on his view, relayed with very British wit, that Anna Freud never fully accepted Winnicott because of his views on regression: “Now this idea of regression caused special affront, really. [Anna Freud] might have said, she did say, it’s the one thing we tried to avoid in analysis. . . . I mean she is a keen ego-fetisher, she was keen on the ego” (p. 15).
Brett Kahr’s chapter on the evolution of Winnicott’s ideas about the role of hateful feelings both in mothering infants and in the analyst’s countertransference is especially thoughtful and illuminates the highly problematic side of Winnicott’s work with at least some of his patients. Kahr evocatively paints a picture of a man who was encountering and attempting to make sense of his own countertransference hatred of his patients, in part in order to expand psychoanalytic work to include patients with severe disturbance. He suggests that the development of Winnicott’s theory of the role of hatred in conducting psychoanalysis stemmed from a number of sources. The traumas that Winnicott suffered in World War II (including the death in combat of a second cousin, the near destruction of his childhood home by a German bomb, and his first wife’s being injured in the explosion); the psychic traumas of his many difficult patients; the unexpressed hatred he observed in his fellow analysts in their refusal to work with more difficult patients and in the more stark expressions of hatred of such patients by psychiatrists of the time in their use of violent and humiliating interventions (i.e., lobotomies, induced comas and fevers, medications administered rectally)—all, Kahr argues, led to the formation of a theory that, unlike any before him, embraced the essential role played by hatred in mothering and, by extension, in the analyst’s countertransference.
Of relevance to trying to distinguish the real and actual Winnicott from the fantasied Winnicott, Kahr carefully details a number of serious boundary violations Winnicott committed in his analytic work with more disturbed patients, as well as with colleagues and friends, boundary crossings that were considered grievous violations even by his contemporaries. These violations, in retrospect, likely arose from reaction formations against hatred of his patients. However, they likely also elicited provocative and hateful attacks on Winnicott.
In fact, the first section of The Winnicott Tradition highlights the troubling fact that the analytic community during the infancy and childhood of psychoanalysis was rife with what we would now consider dual relationships that resulted in frank abuses of power and exploitation of patients’ parental transferences to their analysts, as well as analysts’ indulgence of grandiose countertransferences in the face of such idealizing transferences. In his chapter, James William Anderson recounts that Winnicott’s first analyst, James Strachey, and his wife Alix wrote disparagingly and mockingly about Winnicott to each other (p. 27; see also Meisel and Kendricks 1985, p. 166). He also details how Joan Riviere, Winnicott’s second analyst, had been sent, after a failed analysis with Ernest Jones, to Freud himself, who during her analysis asked her to translate his work into English, a request she honored but rightfully resented (p. 29). During her treatment of Winnicott, she openly discouraged him from pursuing theoretical lines that diverged from Klein’s and publicly criticized a paper he had given, saying, rather cruelly, “He just makes theory out of his own sickness” (p. 19). And when Winnicott, earlier, had asked his supervisor, Klein, to analyze him after his disappointing experience with Strachey, she exhibited what seems a moment of restraint by refusing to do so, only to turn around and ask him to analyze her adult son and let her supervise the case (which, to Winnicott’s credit, he refused to allow). Thus, Winnicott’s analytic childhood and adolescence, marked by intergenerational betrayals of confidence and the flagrant use of what today we would call “undue influence,” might have been expected to lead to an “adulthood” dominated by repetition compulsion or reaction formation. And in fact, as both Kahr and Anderson make clear, Winnicott’s bent was, in certain disturbing ways, toward repeating the abuses he suffered, even while he bravely sought (and perhaps because he sought) to undo the paternalism and rigidity he had encountered in his own analysts and mentors.
Winnicott’s boundary crossings and, in some cases, violations include his analyzing Masud Khan while also collaborating with him (Anderson, pp. 33–35; Kahr, p. 78); analyzing Khan’s first wife after Khan had cheated on her; encouraging Marion Milner to enter analysis with him even though they were friends and colleagues and Winnicott had analyzed her husband, insisting on conducting the analysis in Milner’s home (Emma Letley, p. 41), terminating her treatment by showing up at the painting school she attended to tell her (Kahr, p. 77), and referring her to an analyst who had treated his first wife (Kahr, p. 77); treating a woman likely having borderline personality structure for free and, during her treatment, hiring her on to serve as a receptionist and secretary for his practice, as well as for his wife’s brother, and asking her to look after his wife when she was suffering emotional difficulties (Kahr, pp. 75–77).
Despite (or, more likely, because of) the seriousness of these revelations of poor behavior, Kahr reveals what appears to be his own (I should say “our”) ambivalence about seeing these failings in Winnicott. Upon detailing them assiduously, he seems to temper the impact of these disclosures, soft-pedaling, for example, the treatment of the woman he hired as “somewhat non-traditional.” Indeed, Kahr closes the chapter by explaining that he took the title of his paper (“Winnicott’s Anni Horribiles”) from a speech in which Queen Elizabeth II spoke about a difficult year she had been through and “survived” (p. 80). The comparison to the queen of England strikes me as an attempt to restore Winnicott to his throne, by softening the writer’s “outing” of Winnicott’s transgressions to protect readers from becoming so disappointed with Winnicott that they lose him as a good-enough theorist. Such a dynamic is familiar to any of us who have seen a hero’s exploitative behavior exposed. Nevertheless, we should hope that as analysts we can at least strive to trust one another to hold an ambivalent object in mind without excessive splitting.
Winnicott’s theories have an element of poetic simplicity that allows them to be absorbed almost without thought, without close reading of their nuances. Concepts such as the transitional object, the good enough mother, holding, primary maternal preoccupation, the role of hatred in mothering and in countertransference—these all have an intuitive rightness. Such concepts slip easily into a spot that already existed in our minds even though we lacked words for them. Winnicott himself was impressed with the widespread acceptance of his concept of the transitional object. However, as with anything real in the way that good poetry is real, there are many layers of comprehension, many layers of engagement with the experience of knowing.
The Winnicott Tradition contributes a great deal to the effort to excavate and explore the implicit and unspoken meanings hidden in clear sight between his words, to see his ideas beyond their own context and beyond the impact they have had explicitly and implicitly on the way analysts now work. Winnicott is often perceived as being such an original thinker, such a paradigm shifter, that he occupies a sphere all his own (as seen in his being strongly associated with the so-called Independent Group). Nonetheless, several of the authors in this book elegantly draw connections between his work and that of others and, in so doing, more clearly identify the ways Winnicott agreed with and diverged from other perspectives. These include chapters about analysts with whom Winnicott directly collaborated, such as Emma Letley’s on Milner’s collaboration with Winnicott and an historically illuminating paper by Nellie Thompson on the less well-known but profound impact of Phyllis Greenacre and Winnicott on each other, particularly in their shared interest in “the significance of intrauterine life, the transformation of the fetus into an infant, and the influence of the birth experience itself on the infant” (p. 101), as well as the idea of “aggression . . . as a manifestation of biological growth” (p. 103) and the concept of the “facilitating environment.” Also included are chapters relating Winnicott to figures whose thinking and work he encountered more ambivalently. Robert Hinshelwood, for example, writes on the competitive antagonism Winnicott felt toward Bion as Klein came to see the latter as more in line with her thinking. William Meredith-Owen’s well-written yet complex paper on Winnicott and Jung is useful in helping us consider how, despite Winnicott’s deeply critical stance on Jung’s theories and on Jung himself, they shared an “ambition to reach beyond the repressed unconscious” to allow for a “reparative emergence (construed as affect by Winnicott, psyche by Jung) of the unrepressed affective unconscious” (p. 58).
Lawrence Kirshner’s chapter on Winnicott and Lacan, a concise take on Kirshner’s excellent collection of articles comparing the two theorists (2011), elegantly and intricately outlines both the stark differences between Winnicott’s and Lacan’s theories—especially their views on clinical technique—and the subtle yet important ways in which their theories converge. He notes that both men deemphasize the drive-based model of the Freuds and Klein. Winnicott and Lacan, Kirshner writes, “shared the aim of moving beyond the mechanistic and biologic models of the psyche that informed classical psychoanalytic theory to focus on the singularity of each person” (p. 85). He elaborates that both men helped psychoanalysis shift away from the conceptualization of development as a “predetermined sequence of psychosexual stages” to what is now the more generally accepted understanding of development as consisting of “the emergence of a subject or self in early life and the ongoing effort to sustain a durable, psychic organisation against the disappointments and frustrations of subsequent events” (p. 88). It is difficult to overestimate the impact and reach that such a change in the way development is framed has had on the field of psychoanalysis as currently practiced, influencing contemporary Freudian, Kohutian, relational, and modern Kleinian schools of thought. While Kirshner recognizes the elemental differences in their theories, he suggests that to work “between” the two is not only feasible but may, in fact, be a more effective way of addressing the full breadth of the mind than either theory taken separately: the importance of speech and of signifiers, on one hand, and of use of the mind as a way of connecting affectively, perhaps nonverbally, on the other.
Deborah Luepnitz’s chapter illustrates the applicability of Winnicott’s theories not just to other theoretical perspectives, but to the types of patients that typically are not seen as amenable to (and so are seldom offered) psychoanalytically oriented treatments. In addition, her chapter offers the strongest and clearest examples in this volume of working clinically from a Winnicottian perspective. Her touching presentation of her therapy with a woman in her sixties living at Project H.O.M.E., a residential program for homeless adults in Philadelphia, beautifully shows how, over the course of a treatment with an empathic therapist sensitive to the many layers of intrapsychic experience even with highly concrete and marginally functioning patients, a transitional space between patient and therapist can be created. Without giving away the punch line, as the patient comes to be more comfortable and trusting with the therapist, the latter is able to draw on their experiences together to generate playful word games and associations that, as in a Squiggle game, they each contribute to, so that they become, at least for moments, a thinking couple. Luepnitz does a great service, too, by reminding us how useful an analytic approach, thoughtfully applied, can be in work with patients from any circumstance and at any level of functioning.
Winnicott’s theories have been frequently criticized for their neglect of oedipal configurations, of the father, and of sexuality. This neglect no doubt resulted from Winnicott’s eagerness to address what had been lacking in psychoanalytic theory. Where Freud emphasized the role of the oedipal father at the expense of the preoedipal mother, Klein emphasized the role of the fantasied mother at the expense of who the mother actually was and what she actually did. Winnicott, in turn, shifted the lens away from the familial triad and the father’s impact on ego and superego formation, away from the drives and away from the mother as partitioned into functions that evoke certain drive-driven fantasies. Instead he trained the analyst’s eye on the way the real mother’s real behavior facilitates or impedes the mind’s unfolding: the encouragement and, with development, subsequent gentle deflation of the infant’s sense of controlling the world, the gradual efflorescence of a meaningful space bridging mother and child as the child’s subjectivity grows, the shift from a pre-empathic “ruthlessness” (Winnicott 1965) to the possibility of guilt and remorse. Yet, as is typical with theoretical paradigm shifters, the baby (in this case, the father) can get thrown out with the bathwater.
For example, the boundary issues he had with some of his patients point to his difficulties with the paternal function, the deliminiting impact of what he himself described as the protective “‘no’ to incest” (Haydée Faimberg, p. 140). In fact, there are biographical reasons to consider that Winnicott himself was motivated to deny the impact of his father’s competitiveness and intolerance, in the service of his own oedipal struggles, of his son’s normal healthy aggression. Two incidents mentioned earlier in the book, in Anderson’s fascinating chapter, involve Winnicott’s father mocking his three-year-old son for loving a girl doll (whereupon he smashed in the doll’s nose) and his father’s sending him off to boarding school at twelve after he said “drat” at the dinner table (pp. 21–22). Interestingly, while Anderson locates Winnicott’s interest in the role of aggression in the development of one’s True Self and coming to access it, neither Winnicott nor Anderson identifies the oedipal implications of these interactions.
In fact, several of the more outstanding papers in this collection focus on the role of the father, the paternal function, and oedipality. One of these is a chapter by Thomas Ogden in which he implicitly brings in the paternal function in the form of “the third.” Ogden has undertaken a project to perform a kind of exegisis, through several stellar papers (2001, 2004, 2012, 2014, 2016) of Winnicott’s writings. In these papers, he moves to and from Winnicott’s words. Thus, in a truly Winnicottian way, he plays with Winnicott’s ideas, making them both his and Winnicott’s and infusing them with new life. His paper in this volume applies this approach to the idea of potential space. Ogden describes how the infant moves from a place where “the subjectivity of the mother-infant unit is only a potential, held by the aspect of the mother that lies outside of the mother-infant unity” to a place where the “space between symbol and symbolised, mediated by an interpreting self, is the space in which creativity becomes possible and is the space in which we are alive as human beings, as opposed to being simply reflexively reactive beings” (pp. 125–126). Ogden makes an important and clinically useful distinction here between two-ness and three-ness. Three-ness involves an interpreting mind, a mind that can think about the “symbol and symbolised,” the mother and child and the space that exists between them. Two-ness, by contrast, is the division of the mother-infant unity without what Bion would call “thinking thoughts,” or alpha function, which involves reacting as opposed to being or, worse, the experience of “falling forever.” In making this distinction, Ogden identifies the way that Winnicott, without either of them mentioning the father explicitly, brings the third into the relation between mother and child, a space between them that has its corollary in the father as the oedipal third.
In a brilliant chapter on the paternal function (a topic on which she has written previously [2014]), Haydée Faimberg more explicitly addresses the notion of the paternal function that is implicit yet central to the Winnicottian perspective. She looks at several clinical moments in a case begun by Winnicott in 1955 and presented in the posthumously published Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis (1986) to illustrate Winnicott’s acute sensitivity to issues relating to the paternal function. She refers to Bleger’s work (1967) on the analytic frame as a vessel for “non-process” and the “not-me” to consider how Winnicott conceptualizes the analytic setting in terms of the paternal function, whereas the analysis proper is understood in terms of the child’s relation to the mother. She also highlights the way Winnicott brought intersubjectivity into the scope of psychoanalysis, as he emphasized the action of making an interpretation.
Several chapters later, Lesley Caldwell writes about the same case. Taking a somewhat different approach, Caldwell similarly sees in this case the influence of Freudian theory and, as Faimberg points out, elements of oedipality. However, Caldwell also shows how Winnicott’s technique includes a focus not just on the patient’s love for Winnicott, but on Winnicott’s love for his patient. Interestingly, Winnicott does not directly disclose his love (as a relationalist might) but rather implies it in his interpreting the patient’s reluctance to recognize Winnicott’s love for him. (As an aside, I note that the editors do not mention that both authors write about the same case. Explaining their decision to include both papers and discussing how they complement and differ from one another would have been helpful.)
Other highlights of the book include (but are by no means limited to) James Rose’s creative application of Winnicott’s model of subjectivity to thinking about reverie and unrepresented or non-figured experience; Vincenzo Bonaminio, in one of the more frankly technical chapters, on the spectrum between interpreting and not interpreting; and Alexandra Harrison’s chapter extending her work on matches and mismatches between analyst and patient to explore the way gaps in time between verbal turns taken by patient and analyst can allow the experience of aloneness with another that Winnicott describes, particularly in his paper “The Capacity to Be Alone” (1958).
Perhaps due to the vastness of the project of collecting papers addressing the breadth of topics covered by this book, it contains many editing and proofreading errors including misspellings, repeated lines, redundant points, undeveloped theses, and clumsy syntax. In addition, a few of the chapters are poorly written and detract from what otherwise is a fine book. Perhaps that is fitting. As Winnicott, particularly in how he comported himself as a clinician, was far from perfect, his massive influence on contemporary psychoanalysis would suggest that, despite his errors, flaws, and blind spots, he was most certainly good enough with regard to how he changed our understanding of human development and clinical technique. Thus, just as those of us who are informed by Winnicott’s theories in our work are grateful for this, so too should we be grateful for this “good enough” collection.