Sublime

Winnicott would never insist on Klein’s equation of development and the acquisition of knowledge. And in his later work he would replace the capacity to know by the capacity to play, as a criterion for health. In Winnicott’s work it would sometimes seem as though for him the (perhaps unconscious) aim of any method, or set of rules, was to make

Winnicott assumed that the child had a primary wish to be understood, indeed ‘longs for someone to bring understanding’.32 He does not begin with the conventional psychoanalytic conviction that the child is self-evasive. The Winnicottian child tends to be a collaborator rather than an antagonist, so Winnicott’s early papers present a less imposing

What was the analyst’s desire vis à vis the patient, what was the analyst using the patient for, how did the patient figure in the analyst’s own developmental project?