On “asking for a kind of revolution” in clinical psychoanalysis: Winnicott’s concept of regression, care-cure, working within the realm of needs and creating new experiences

Abstract

in this article, I will address the radical departure of Winnicott’s theoretical-clinical ideas from traditional psychoanalytic work, introducing a revolutionary change in clinical psychoanalysis – a transition from “extension” to “scientific revolution” and “paradigm change or paradigm shift” (to use Thomas Kuhn’s terminology of the “Structure of scientific revolution”, 1962). For me, these revolutionary ideas of Winnicott are profoundly important,theoretically and practically, as they provide a formative matrix and a mode of work and transformation that conventional psychoanalytic work does not offer (Eshel, 2013a, 2016, 2017a, 2019a, 2019b).