Winnicott

For Winnicott there was the conflict between two trends, to communicate and to hide. The self is, by definition, elusive, the player of hide and seek.37

Like the mother’s long-term tending of her infant and child, psychoanalysis is a ‘giving the patient back what the patient brings’.

it is the figure of the artist who embodies the drive for authenticity that is for Winnicott exemplary for that integrity of being he values above all else.

to distinguish between ‘pathological withdrawal and healthy central self-communication’:

interpretation was a sophisticated extension of infant care, albeit a crucial part of the analyst’s primary aim in the treatment which was to establish and maintain an environment conducive to growth. The defining characteristic of the analytic setting for Winnicott was not exclusively verbal exchange.

becomes dissociated from the body and a kind of uprooted mental functioning evolves that is, Winnicott believes, ‘an encumbrance to the psyche-soma or to the individual being’s continuity of being which constitutes the self’.

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 Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘mutual domination’).

The mother does not give the infant a feed, the infant gives the mother the opportunity to feed him. The clues provided by the patient facilitate the analyst’s capacity to interpret.

‘being seen is at the basis of creative looking’. Perception – looking at things – is an addition to, but must never be separated from, apperception – seeing oneself.