Winnicott

‘On Influencing and Being Influenced’, 1941 34

facilitating object.

Real development can only come out of, and is the process of finding, belief in the environment. For Winnicott a capacity to be spontaneous can only come out of an early experience of reliability. Only with a backdrop of continuity, one might say, can the patient re-find his own developmental lines.

Resisting the limitation of definitions, Winnicott’s sometimes confusing personal idiom often depends on the reader getting a sense of what he means.

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.

part of the function of the pathological split-off mind that Winnicott describes is to take on responsibility for an environment that failed. A genuine grievance about something in his early environment that the infant was incapable of modifying is turned against the self. The child lives as if there is no mother, an apparently self-sufficient unit

what psychoanalysis was about: that for the patient, and this was more true the more disturbed the patient was, the reliability of the setting that the analyst maintains does much of the work of the psychoanalysis.

How the child involves, by invitation and refusal, the witnesses; the degree and kind of reassurance the child seeks from the environment; how free the child is in his use of the spatula; all these are telling details. And they can be easily translated, as Winnicott implies, to the adult or child patient’s use of the analyst and his interpretations

What Winnicott rather misleadingly calls ‘shared reality’ is constituted by the sharing of illusions. Shared reality is the area of overlap between those individual preoccupations that Winnicott calls illusions, not because they are false but because they combine the desired with the actual in tolerable ways. ‘If we wish,’ he writes, ‘we may collec