Winnicott

He played an essential part in what he would later call – referring to his concept of the transitional object – ‘the interplay between separateness and union’2 of the various groups that were to emerge in the British Society.

The infant developed from a state of pure subjectivity to a capacity for virtual objectivity that Winnicott associated with scientific method. But the kind of science he valued had its roots, he insisted, in the more primitive states of subjectivity out of which it had grown and on which it depended. Development was not progressive mastery, an over

I would say that Strachey had one thing quite clear in his mind as a result of his visit to Freud: that a process develops in the patient, and that what transpires cannot be produced but it can be made use of. This is what I feel about my own analysis with Strachey, and in my work I have tried to follow the principle through and to emphasize the id

The analytic setting itself could be seen as a transitional space for collaborative exchange.

He tries to humanize Klein’s harsh rigour by distinguishing between ‘normal reassurance through reality’ and ‘abnormal manic defence’. Winnicott never shared the smug psychoanalytic contempt for the idea of reassurance.

It was often Winnicott’s inclination to dispel a contradiction, here between Klein and Anna Freud, with a paradox. To find a third position that would combine, and so modify, two apparently incompatible options.

The act of interpretation, aside from its content, expresses collaborative concern; it comes out of identifying with the patient – being able, to some extent, to imagine what it is like to be that person at that moment – and then the more unexpected consequence of ‘believing in’ what he needs.

He was beginning to define, in his earliest work, a new kind of competence in which treatment was the provision of an opportunity for the patient, an opportunity to make himself known.

‘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.