Sublime

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.

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

Adam Phillips