Sublime

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?

In a review of Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, one of the most revealing pieces Winnicott ever wrote, he suggested: If I want to say that Jung was mad, and that he recovered, I am doing nothing worse than I would do in saying of myself that I was sane and through analysis and self-analysis I achieved some measure of insanity.

One of the aims of psychoanalysis was to re-establish continuity with whatever constituted the patient’s ‘personal beginning’.

down-to-earth

We will see Winnicott thinking along what will become familiar lines of the relationship between the continuous and the interrupted, the present and the absent, the simple and the complicated in a person’s life.