Abstract
The Winnicott whom Glen Gabbard encounters in this volume is at the height of his creative and clinical powers yet also in significant distress and conflict. He has, as Gabbard astutely points out, become one of the few psychoanalytically informed public intellectuals consulting to an entire generation of British baby boomers through his frequent pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and public lectures. Simultaneously, Winnicott struggles to find a place for himself in the analytic community, repeatedly challenging Kleinian orthodoxy over the role of actual experience in the organization of the infant’s internal world. Winnicott’s despair at finding himself a psychoanalytic outsider was matched only by his discomfort at the prospect of his work being seamlessly assimilated by one of the various schools at the British Psychoanalytical Society. Perhaps it was Winnicott’s struggle to sustain the isolation necessary for his constantly evolving creativity—alongside his paradoxical need for recognition—that gave rise to his most revolutionary psychoanalytic ideas.
Gabbard shows us that Winnicott’s writing from this period demanded nothing less than a reshaping of the entire analytic project. Analysis no longer hinged on the analyst’s well-timed interpretations, but was reconceived as a process in which two unique individuals learned over time to listen to one another, and in so doing learned to listen to themselves. Both the individual and the dyad maintain their integrity, yet both are transformed in analytic praxis. Winnicott’s papers, letters, and communications in this volume are a significant and central contribution to the unfolding paradigm shift in psychoanalysis: as Ogden and others have characterized it, a phenomenological, ontological turn occurs here, bringing the subjectivity of the analyst—in parallel with the mother’s subjectivity—into the treatment space. Harold Searles and others (Edgar Levenson and Philip Bromberg from the interpersonal world) emerge out of this extraordinary, creative moment in Winnicott’s career.