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.

So-called developmental achievements are only achievements for Winnicott if they are reversible. So a relation with external reality is dependent upon a capacity to relinquish this relation in a return to states of primary unintegration in which one can be, for example, ‘miles away’, or simply preoccupied.

From a psychoanalytic perspective the patient is always suffering from the self-knowledge he has had to refuse himself. Winnicott emphasizes in his first psychoanalytic papers that it is an ‘attitude… relatively free from anxiety’, not exclusively the interpretative process which can be a part of that attitude, that enables the child to become inte

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.

‘On Influencing and Being Influenced’, 1941 34

In Freud, reality is that which frustrates the individual; in Winnicott’s account, at the very beginning at least, reality is both potentially enriching and also reassuring in the way it sets limits to fantasy. It is not something inexorable to which a person must comply but can be something a person can use for satisfaction.

This ‘aggressive potential’ that is not referred to as an instinct is tantamount, in Winnicott’s writing of this period, to a developmental potential. ‘Aggression’, he writes elsewhere, ‘is seen more as evidence of life.’22 But it has to be included, ‘fused in’, with the infant’s capacity for instinctual relationship that he equates with the ‘eroti

Winnicott had built his theory out of the self-descriptions of patients, not out of a special language that was divorced from clinical work; there were inevitably drawbacks to its application.

He tends, throughout his work, to write of capacities rather than positions or stages. The emphasis on capacity in his work allows for individual differences. ‘Capacity’, with its implication of stored possibility, and its combination of the receptive and the generative, blurs the boundary between activity and passivity.