Abstract
Thanks to Adrienne Harris and Phillip Blumberg for their inspired idea of having Winnicott’s Collected Works reviewed volume by volume in JAPA. The project has resulted in a distinctive contribution to Winnicott scholarship on the history and evolution of psychoanalysis and its contemporary parameters. These review essays testify to the international interest in Winnicott’s theoretical and clinical sophistication, his central place in postwar English psychoanalysis, and his later influence worldwide, but they also draw attention to his popularity now in the United States and a certain interest in previous decades that deserves systematic exploration and research.
Apart from two long-established Israeli Winnicott scholars, Ofra Eshel and Emanuel Berman, and Giuseppe Civitarese, known for his work on Bion and the Italian development of field theory, the reviewers are American. As a direct result of the Collected Works’ publication in 2016, a volume of papers edited by Joseph Aguayo discussing Winnicott’s visits to the U.S. in the 1960s will be published next year. It includes two earlier papers by American analysts, Francis Baudry and Nellie Thompson, which come out of a very different moment but are equally relevant today.
I hope there will be continuing detailed investigation of the American Winnicott (or Winnicotts), especially with regard to the general shifts that have occurred in psychoanalytic practice and scholarship in what may be regarded as distinctly American schools of thought.
The Project In Formation
Helen Taylor Robinson and I inherited the Collected Works somewhat reluctantly following the untimely death of its recently appointed general editor, the American analyst and scholar Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Before her appointment in 2011, the idea of a Collected Works had had a checkered, long discussed history, though its importance had been insisted on by Christopher Bollas, and then by Jan Abram. Both were instrumental in the decision made by the Winnicott Trust to undertake a complete edition now instead of delaying another decade or two.
In the short time Elisabeth worked on the idea she developed a comprehensive plan, and the Trust decided to take it forward on that basis. Following her death Routledge dropped out, and our agent, Steph Ebdon of the Marsh agency, worked tirelessly to find another publisher. Sarah Harrington of Oxford University Press in New York realized the potential of this massive project, and she and her team worked closely with us throughout to produce the Collected Works both in print and online.
Unlike The Complete Works of W. R Bion, edited almost singlehandedly by the late Chris Mawson over a period of at least ten years, the Collected Works was a joint project. The chronological continuity of the volumes in both collected editions, Winnicott’s and Bion’s, allows us to trace each writer’s unique evolution and enables an important mapping exercise for the continuing exploration of their thinking and possible overlaps. These “standard editions” of Bion (2014) and Winnicott (2016) encourage close readings of both theorists, highlighting their similarities and differences, as well as their positions then and now in the wider history of the British Psychoanalytical Society, of which both authors were distinguished members.
In reading the JAPA essays I have wondered how different Elisabeth’s project would have been as delivered by her, rather than by Helen and me, inserted as we both are in the intensely passionate history of British psychoanalysis and its inherited traumas. Elisabeth, like Chris, was intending to tackle the Collected Works alone apart from Clay Pearn, her technical expert, who then came on board with us and OUP. After all our work on the CW itself and the responses it has produced from others, I find myself feeling both privileged and, in a perhaps parochial way, relieved that, despite the internationalism of the final edition, and the undoubted recognition of Winnicott as an international figure, the overarching framework of the volumes and the seemingly inevitable repetition of historic difficulties can be seen as clearly originating in London.
These realizations make the more general questions relating to any author more interesting. Are there distinctly national versions of Winnicott, and, if so, what is shared and agreed upon across these borders, and what is not? How separate psychoanalytic cultures as part of very different national cultures have evolved historically to deliver a Winnicott who transcends a narrowly local psychoanalytic set of claims seems to me a fertile arena in which, as yet, we lack definitive answers. But we do have the parameters of the field for launching this enquiry.
Helen and I found ourselves managing a project of someone else’s design, a project with a difficult, decades-long history whose traumatic effects continued to weigh on us all.
Aware of our limitations and the temporal constraints of our work, we asked eleven Winnicott scholars to write introductions for the separate volumes. Theirs is a further contribution that builds on and consolidates the completed project’s fostering of psychoanalytic thinking; these introductions have since been published together as a separate volume (Treacher Kabesh 2019). To provide additional expertise a project management group was appointed, chaired by the late Amal Treacher Kabesh; the group included Clay Pearn and Robert Adès, who became our invaluable assistant editor and wrote the introduction to volume 12.
Upon publication, the Collected Works was introduced in New York at the New School for Social Research in 2017, on the initiative of Adrienne Harris, to whom the editors and the Trust were very grateful. This was followed by a second launch at the British Psychoanalytical Society in London, Winnicott’s own society. In New York Helen suggested that in chronologically arranging the works of a known Winnicott, and interpolating new material amid the familiar, we had effectively delivered a new Winnicott, providing an alternative perspective from which to approach what we all thought we knew. For instance, Playing and Reality (1971b), perhaps the best known of Winnicott’s collections, appears in the Collected Works with its eleven chapters distributed across three volumes; through this placement with the other work in which he was involved at the time, different readings become possible.
The opportunity to look at his entire output, to consider it in regard to when, where, and how it arose, and to examine his consistent preoccupations at particular times, assisted for instance in the definitive dating of some pieces, such as “Fear of Breakdown” (Caldwell 2021), and to realize the extent of references to the work of the negative, a concept which is there in embryo over a long period, and certainly well before André Green’s development of it in relation to the final version of the transitional objects paper in Playing and Reality (1971b).
Reviewers’ Takes On Their Subject
Like the volume editors in their scholarly introductions, the JAPA reviewers note how much of the mature Winnicott was already there in the 1940s, and how early the radical shift to an analytic approach grounded in being—the being of the patient and the being of the analyst—can be discerned. Arguably from “Primitive Emotional Development” (1945) and certainly from “Hate in the Countertransference” (1947), the task of the analyst in “holding” her patient, with its enabling or traumatic consequences, emphasizes the clinical implications of the extreme dependency that derives from initial human vulnerability.
This emphasis on being and experience also anticipates the ontological and epistemological approaches to analytic work discussed in a recent American contribution (Ogden 2019) referenced in several of the reviews.
There are also unfamiliar, less welcome Winnicotts. Joyce Slochower (2020), reviewing volume 2, is dismayed by his support of corporal punishment, but struck by his attention to the war, noted too in Christopher Reeves’s introduction to the volume. In emphasizing this volume’s great papers, “Primitive Emotional Development” (1945) and “The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation” (1941), Slochower highlights the latter paper’s close attention to the setting, a theme of much recent analytic work that appears as a central background throughout the JAPA reviews, and as the main trajectory of Peter Goldberg’s review of volume 6.
The authors introduce potential directions for contemporary psychoanalysis while attending to familiar concerns as they emerge in ways both expected and unexpected. Winnicott’s relation to Freud and to his colleagues, a thread in all eleven essays, is the major focus of Emanuel Berman’s rehearsing of two Winnicotts, a familiar dichotomy of his, for which he finds definitive confirmation, in his review (2021) in the years covered by volume 5. In 1966 Winnicott will write, “I believe Freud did not have a place in his topography of the mind for the experience of things cultural. He gave new value to inner psychic reality, and from this came a new value for things that are actual and truly external. Freud used the word ‘sublimation’ to point the way to a place where cultural experience is meaningful, but perhaps he did not get so far as to tell us where in the mind cultural experience is” (1967, p. 128).
This statement underlines the area of potential space and transitional phenomena for which Winnicott is probably best known, and thereby extends the clinical field through his continuing examination of playing and reality and the technical questions this apparent juxtaposition presents for the work of analysis today. Well over half a century of development of what will become his psychoanalytic view of reality—both inner and outer— and the commitment to their overlap, can be discerned through his different emphasis on what is created, rather than what is symbolized and the unconscious wishes informing it.
In her case history The Hands of the Living God Marion Milner (1969) describes “this interplay between the articulate and inarticulate levels of functioning as basic in all creative activity” (p. 293). While for Freud it is the unreality of the imaginative world that makes it a source of pleasure, for Winnicott and for his colleague Milner it is its reality. “I think we must reckon,” he wrote in 1956, “that there is in being from the first a crude form of what we later call the imagination. This enables us to say the infant takes in with the hands and with the sensitive skin of the face as well as of the mouth. The imaginative feeding experience is much wider than the purely physical experience” (CW 5.2.1, p. 116).
In “Making the Best of a Bad Job,” Bion’s last paper (1979), which links the body with communication, he argues that the analyst needs to be able to listen not only to the words but also to the music, so that he can hear a remark not easily translated into black marks on paper.
So we must consider what the method of communication of self with self might be. We are familiar with using free associations for purposes of interpretation; I wonder whether it is also possible to use or to tap these communications before they reach the cerebral spheres, before they reach the area we regard as conscious or rational thought. Can any part be played in all this by what I have called “imaginative conjectures”? (Bion 1979).
Here is a not dissimilar emphasis that Winnicott and Bion came to share but is only now emerging as worthy of close attention.
Winnicott’s Range
If the consistent frame of Winnicott’s work is local, it is by no means confined to the British Society and his analytic colleagues Klein, Balint, Bowlby, Fairbairn, Anna Freud, Milner, and Bion. He is constantly reaching out to others in the fields of medicine, mental health, the caring professions, and social policy, and beyond to British society more generally, in his commitment to bringing a psychoanalytic dimension to wider debates about health and illness, and health provision in its sociocultural context. He insists that diagnosis requires attuned listening for psychoanalytic understanding, and his earliest work was often concerned with instilling in his fellow doctors an understanding of normal emotional development and the emotional basis of much illness.
He valued the medical model as an accompaniment to the work of the psychoanalyst, and his interest in observation, his commitment to history taking, and his diagnostic skills, taken with his extraordinary capacity for unconscious insights in clinical work, provide a basis for thinking through the continuing conscious and unconscious relationships that facilitate or hinder well-being. Here again is a possible point of comparison with the U.S. and its historical medicalization of psychoanalysis.
In the early volumes Winnicott is in continual dialogue with Melanie Klein, whom he almost never mentions negatively, though he uses Kleinian terms in his own way. She, on the other hand, almost never mentioned him at all after his striking out on his own trajectory.
As living practices, language and psychoanalysis are conditioned historically and socially, and as early as 1952, after his paper “Anxiety Insecurity” (1952a), Winnicott passionately insisted in a letter to Klein (1952b) that he had to speak and write in his own language if he were to develop not only his ideas, but hers as well. Each of us, he persisted, has to find our own way of speaking and writing. Otherwise our words become lifeless; they constrain and smother creativity; they inhibit new directions rather than enabling ideas to develop and analysts to go further in what it is we all share—psychoanalysis.
The Los Angeles recording of his paper “A Personal View of the Kleinian Contribution” (1962), now available in volume 12 online (courtesy of the archivist at the New Center and Joseph Aguayo) is more frank, but Winnicott still insists on Klein’s incalculable value for psychoanalysis. “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” (1960), given at the IPA Congress in Edinburgh, is about infancy, not psychoanalysis, but it directly confronts the Kleinian legacy and the “confusion about the relative importance of the personal and environmental influences in the development of the individual” (p. 37). In infancy, before language, how can one evaluate the different contributions of what the baby brings and what he or she meets in the environment, and the implications of those answers for psychoanalytic practice?
Winnicott In The British Society
Winnicott was twice president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, once in the 1950s and again in the 1960s. He did not endorse the groups or the compromise solution to the Controversial Discussions, and his letters reveal his attempts to minimize the antagonism between Anna Freud’s followers, Melanie Klein’s, and the rest of the society. Although it was a troubled institution with a troubled recent history, the dedicated clinicians of the Society worked to hold together the different strands of training despite the often uncomfortable atmosphere at meetings.
We know from many reports (Padel 1991; Rycroft 1993; Robinson 2015) that the atmosphere in the Society in those decades did not encourage easy exchange, and that collaboration across the different traditions was a demanding activity given what Robinson has called the traumas of British psychoanalysis since the 1930s and their uneasy resolution in the Controversial Discussions. In the London scientific meetings of those earlier decades, having to come to terms with the “languages” being deployed by the different groups must often have seemed a gargantuan task for candidates, especially since there seems to have been very little enthusiasm among senior analysts for doing any such thing.
Charles Rycroft wrote in 1993 about his experience giving a paper in 1954: The so-called scientific meetings were all too often not discussions but collisions. I once read a paper to the Society about a woman who had dreamed that the moon fell out of the sky into a dustbin [Rycroft 1955]. During the discussion Melanie Klein expressed her regret that I had not had a sufficiently deep analysis; at the time I took this as an insult to Dr Payne [Sylvia Payne, Rycroft’s analyst]. I heard later that some of the audience had construed my paper as a conscious, deliberate allegory about Klein; it wasn’t, but it is a pleasing idea [quoted in Lanyado and Horne 2006, p. 20].
This history emerges particularly in Glen Gabbard’s review (2021) of volume 7, where he notes a “disregarded, aggrieved, and polemical tone” in Winnicott’s letters. Gabbard’s reading of a letter to the philosopher John Wisdom, written after the latter’s paper on Bion in 1964, differs from mine, but his overall conclusions are essentially the same. “His correspondence makes it clear that [Winnicott] often felt bypassed, unread, left out, misunderstood, and discounted” (p. 975). And he was! Wisdom’s paper was a continuation of long-standing disputes, but in his account of reverie, objects that tantalize, and “what happens depends” he made no reference to them as substantial work done over the preceding two and a half decades by Winnicott and Marion Milner, from whom the notion of reverie derives. Winnicott accused Wisdom of failing as researcher by repeating Bion’s own failure in not linking his work with what had preceded it and contributed to it.
The strength of group allegiances is a source of further complaint and dismay in a letter to Donald Meltzer (Winnicott 1966a) where Winnicott’s irritation with the Kleinians for having attended only one of the previous six scientific meetings, the one in which Betty Joseph was presenting, is evident. Gabbard records a comment of Joseph’s decades later as they discussed Winnicott’s work: “The problem with Winnicott, Glen, is that he tried to be nice to his patients”’ (p. 976). Her dismissiveness is clear, and Gabbard regards it as reflecting the disparities in technique between Winnicott and the Kleinians; “Enlivening others was far more important to Winnicott than forcing his patients to confront the haunting demons in the unconscious. In this regard, perhaps he was ‘being nice’ to his patients.” Later work exploring in depth the distress and disturbance of patients who do not feel alive, and the very demanding analytic work required to bring them into being, confirms Gabbard’s claims and underlines differences in the British tradition and the negative judgments accompanying them. Brett Kahr (1996) comments: “The Kleinian bitterness towards Winnicott and his burgeoning independence reached such proportions that during the late 1960s certain tutors on the child psychotherapy course at the Tavistock Clinic . . . expressly forbade their students to attend Winnicott’s public lectures. . . . Mrs Frances Tustin (personal communication, 22 February 1994), a renowned child psychotherapist, . . . confessed that ‘I in my training was brought up not to read Winnicott’” (p. 77).
Hanna Segal’s intemperate account in American Imago (2006) offered the hard-line Kleinian view of her independent colleagues’ integrity as analysts. In response, Ruth McCall and Elizabeth Wolf organized a joint letter to the editor, Peter Rudnytsky, signed by fifty analysts from the British Society: “We are not disputing her theoretical position but her defamatory remarks about our competence and integrity as psychoanalysts. It is Dr. Segal’s statement that the work of British Independent psychoanalysts is nonanalytic and that it promotes patients living in a lie through the analyst (allegedly) actively taking on the parental role that we object to the most” (McCall and Wolf 2007). Rudnytsky replied that Segal recognized that she “owes an apology to colleagues whom she may inadvertently have offended by the paragraph at issue in her paper,” but he then went on: “I believe I acted in the best Independent spirit by publishing Hanna Segal’s article, and I hope I may even have aided the Independent cause. One thing you can be sure of: it is her genuine conviction, and probably that of the Klein group as a whole, that the Ferenczi-Winnicott-Kohut tradition is ‘essentially non-analytic.’ You have had to live with this insidious attitude on a daily basis for years or even decades” (Rudnytsky letter, February 2007, quoted in Wolf and Antonis 2023, p. 8). The exchange very much supports Ken Robinson’s claims of the traumatic history from which the British Society still struggles to free itself.
Similar statements occasionally arise even now, and while solid scientific grounds can be cited for looking in depth at Winnicott the clinician, this would need to include his work with very difficult patients and the lack of consensus regarding how to work with such patients. Without overvaluing his work, we should look at it with an eye to learning from the successes and failures of someone recognized as a consummate clinician, “an analyst of analysts,” as Gillespie (1973) described him in an obituary.
While much of the criticism of Winnicott arose in regard to his own clinical practice with disturbed patients, his insistence on the importance of the environment, viewed as foundational from the beginning, was also a source of contention, a challenge to the almost exclusive concentration on the inner world in Klein and her followers until Bion’s work of the early sixties.
The review essays consolidate the familiar attention to the child and clinical regression, and, perhaps significantly, they reference a comparatively narrow set of papers: “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” “The Parent-Infant Relationship,” “Communicating and Not Communicating,” all three, if we take the last version of the transitional objects paper, from the 1960s when the primary papers on play also appeared. Some of the titles of these reviews echo Winnicott’s own quirkiness in their approach: “Plea for a Safe Place” (vol. 3), “Eating Your Cake and Having It” (vol. 6), “The Moon of the Magic Casement” (vol. 9). I was moved by Ken Corbett’s use of the moon metaphor and Winnicott’s death in his essay on volume 9.
Jack Foehl and Christopher Bonowitz (2022) interestingly read Therapeutic Consultations (vol. 10) as an experiential companion to Playing and Reality, a teaching volume offering a compendium of clinical examples of the “process of living and becoming” (p. 986). They emphasize Winnicott the clinician and what is to be learned from him particularly on the importance of wordless connectedness and a capacity for communication as the basis of our being. While most of the reviewers make reference to play and playing, their perspectives on this foundational aspect of Winnicott’s psychoanalysis and its development in his theoretical and clinical work (and in subsequent elaborations) largely cover familiar ground. They fail to yield a significantly incisive intervention, and often do not manage to avoid the rehearsal of familiar tropes.
Over and over Winnicott put the question, even more urgent today, of what constitutes a psychoanalytic way of working in the many situations in which an analysis is not possible. His own ways of working with some, though by no means all patients—long sessions, “management” of regressed patients, one-off consultations—posed a continuing challenge to psychoanalytic orthodoxy. They now read as an acknowledgment of analytic worlds whose very different presuppositions about working psychoanalytically rarely seemed to have offered the opportunity to really consider different ways of working in the transference, or attend to the different temporalities always present in a session.
From a perspective that insists on the need to meet patients on the territory they themselves occupy if any analytic work is to be done, Winnicott forces us to ask what an analytic relationship means. He explores how to deploy psychoanalytic knowledge in cases where analysis is either unsuitable or unavailable.
How have we arrived at our familiar ways of working as analysts now? This dimension is of increasing importance as we negotiate the contemporary demands of our practice internationally and fight the temptation to fall back on truisms about how today’s ways of working and thinking have evolved.
Winnicott was creatively active until the end of his life, and his influence continues to be felt through his appreciation of unconscious thinking and of dream life. In “Communicating and Not Communicating” he proposes a sacred area at the core of the personality, “forever immune from the reality principle,” where there is a silent, “absolutely personal” inner communication with subjective objects, with no communication with the outer world. Perhaps what elsewhere he speaks of as “the deep dreaming at the core of the personality” has echoes of current interests in the parallels in dreaming and living he writes about in “Dreaming, Fantasying and Living” (Winnicott 1971a).
Volume 12, edited by Robert Adès, unfortunately not reviewed in the JAPA series, is an invaluable resource that is available free online from OUP Psychology New York. It contains an account of the Collected Works’ compilation, bibliographies, a catalogue of books published by Winnicott, plans for other books, accounts of correspondence, biographies of his correspondents, drawings, a list of works published here for the first time, an essay on his broadcasts, and the broadcasts themselves in audio form. Since the online version allows updating as other material becomes available, I was able to add, with the assistance of a research associate, Luisa Boada, over a hundred newly discovered items that now appear as an additional section in volume 12. They include two earlier versions of “Communicating and Not Communicating,” offering the possibility of tracing shifts in thinking and presentation with different audiences. And there are important contributions from Winnicott’s visits to the U.S. in the early sixties. The majority are letters from the archives of Clifford Scott (1903–1997) held at the National Archive in Ottawa, Canada; the archives of Michael and Enid Balint, held at the University of Essex at Colchester; and the archives of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles.
Scott had trained in psychiatry in Canada and come to the U.K. in the early thirties to study neurology and psychoanalysis. He was an active member of the British Society before his invitation to return to Canada in 1954 to take up a position at McGill. He was the first president of the Canadian Society and assisted in introducing child analysis in North America. He and Winnicott were friends until the latter’s death. Theirs was both an intellectual and a personal friendship, and the letters contain many references to areas of common psychoanalytic interest, exchanges about particular topics, scientific meetings in the British Society, and comments on colleagues and cases. Winnicott’s last letter to Scott dates from 1970. The Balint-Winnicott correspondence, brought to my attention by Shaul Bar Haim of the University of Essex, throws light on a less sympathetic, somewhat rivalrous Winnicott. The audio section of volume 12 contains the BBC broadcasts, another invaluable resource, and the original recordings of the two papers Winnicott gave in Los Angeles in 1962.
The Collected Works offers the privilege of reading Winnicott closely and chronologically, but also of wandering idly, reading him slowly, as Dominique Scarfone recommends in his introduction to volume 4. The eleven authors who have participated in this wonderful initiative offer their own wanderings through the texts, a strong inducement for the reader to do the same.