Donald Winnicott Research Articles

D.W. Winnicott: a biographical portrait

A distillation of painstaking research into the life of Donald Winnicott, tracing his life from his childhood in Plymouth, through his career in paediatrics, to his election as President of the British Psycho-Analytic Society. The author makes many interesting links between Winnicott's life and the development of his theories.

Objects in Transition: A Spatial Paradigm for Creative Design

This article describes the location of creative activity as an extended spatial domain, a transitional space that psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott posits as lying between the creative subject and the objective world. Transitional space is depicted here as a geometric paradigm that supports investigation of cognitive and other resources needed to understand creative practice.

Donald Winnicott and the foundations of child psychotherapy

Abstract The author gives a historical overview of the life and work of Winnicott and describes the far-reaching impact of his many innovative ideas.

Transition and transience: Winnicott on leaving and dying

Abstract The author offers reminiscences and reflections on Donald Winnicott during the last phase of his life and considers the personal and theoretical importance for him of the topic of death. The author goes on to examine similarities and differences between Winnicott's concepts of coming into being and ceasing to be.

Memories of Donald Winnicott

Abstract Barbara Dockar-Drysdale, founder and original therapeutic adviser to the Mulberry Bush School, is now in her eighties, and living in retirement. Her writings make frequent reference to her indebtedness to Winnicott, whom she used to meet monthly over the last seventeen years of his life to discuss their ideas and work. Winnicott wrote of her: ‘Here was someone who knew’.

The development of a dream from concrete realization to symbolic story

This paper is based on material from an analysis with a girl who was four years old at the time she started analysis. I relate how we worked with her feeling of vacillating, between invading and being invaded by the object, and how she was finally able to let go of her omnipotent control to a higher degree than before. Inspired by Hanna Segal and Donald Winnicott, I trace our progress from; (1) a denial of separation; (2) the analysand establishes a certain sense of separation by creating her own “space”. Through splitting and projective identification, she rids herself of feeling dependent and helpless, feelings that she cannot bear to acknowledge. The analyst receives, contains and names these feelings; to a stage where (3) the relationship established through the agency of projective identification is dissolved, and makes way for an ability to experience dependence as well as a recognition of the analyst as a separate person whom the analysand needs and can use.

The Group Experienced as Mother: Early Psychic Structures in Analytic Groups

This paper explores the re-creation of early psychic structures in the beginning phase of slow-open analytic psychotherapy groups. Mervin Glasser's theory of the `core complex' is explored as a model for infantile perceptions of emotional abandonment and engulfment that reoccur in the early period of the group. Donald Winnicott's ideas of the `false self and the `facilitating environment' are used to describe the defensive personality responses to early emotional deprivation as seen in the group. Aspects of the peculiar vulnerability of the first six months of group life are examined. These include selection, holiday breaks and dropouts.

Omnipotence Versus Therapeutic Response in Group-Analytic Therapy

This paper was presented to the Institute of Group Analysis, London, in July 1990, at the end of the qualifying course. It describes the work of a once-weekly group for psychiatric outpatients in a hospital setting. The therapeutic process is discussed in terms of Donald Winnicott's theory. Included also are comments on the author's personal and professional development during the course of training.

Winnicott: An Introduction

“Health is much more difficult to deal with than disease.” D. W. Winnicott I In a talk given in 1945 to the sixth form of St Paul's School, Donald Winnicott described his experience, as a schoolboy, of discovering Darwin's Origin of Species: “I could not leave off reading it. At the time I did not know why it was so important to me, but I see now that the main thing was that it showed that living things could be examined scientifically with the corollary that gaps in knowledge and understanding need not scare me. For me this idea meant a great lessening of tension and consequently a release of energy for work and play.” (Quoted in Davis & Wallbridge, 1983, p. 24.)

Shifting Paradigms in Psychoanalysis since the 1940s

The British School of Psychoanalysis is characterised in both its major subtraditions (the Kleinian and Independent) by an emphasis on the inner world of the infant in the earliest phases of life. The shift from a model of instinctual drives to one of 'internal worlds', in which phantasies of the parents or fragmented parts of the parents are constructed in a phenomenology of the unconscious, was one significant development of Freud's ideas. A second change of emphasis from the classical view was the emphasis given to pre-Oedipal development, focussed primarily on the infant's relation with the mother, and the attempt to theorise primitive states of mind located at this early stage. These ideas were formulated through the development of child analysis, by Melanie Klein and later many others including the most prominent Independent analyst, Donald Winnicott. This framework gave understanding of the roots of psychotic states of mind found in adults, and thus provided the basis for their analytic treatment. This body of ideas is sometimes referred to as 'object-relations' theory, though it is doubtful if the dry associations of that term are very helpful in characterising its emotionally charged and dramatic view of the unconscious mind. These two books provide ways of getting to grips with the concerns of two components of this broad tradition. The first has the work of the Independents or

Theories of Transitional Object Attachment: An Overview

In 1953, Donald Winnicott introduced the term 'transitional object' to describe those blankets, soft toys, and bits of cloth to which young children frequently develop intense, persistent attachments. Winnicott theorized that such T.O. attachments represent an essential phase of ego development leading to the establishment of a sense of self. Subsequent psychological theorists have linked the T.O. to the processes of: separation-individuation; ego and body ego development; the birth of memory, libidinal object constancy, and the capacity for symbolization, creativity; and the capacity for object relations and empathy. This paper reviews the major theories concerning the origin, development and psychological meaning of T.O.'s, and examines their validity in light of current empirical knowledge of T.O. behavior. An argument is made for viewing the T.O. as a developmental facilitator which may acquire different qualities and serve different psychological functions as the child moves toward physical and emotional independence.

‘The Mother Made Conscious’: The Historical Development of a Primary School Pedagogy

The dictum - that the ideal teacher of young children is like 'a mother made conscious' - is Friedrich Froebel's (1782-1852), the educational philosopher and founder of the kindergarten system, and it belongs to the 1840s. But as a piece of educational prescription it has much more recent echoes, particularly in educational advice offered to teachers since the last war, by Donald Winnicott and other members of the British psychoanalytic movement. This article sets out to deal with the development within primary schooling, of certain sets of ideas that have linked the teaching of young children with an understanding of mothering, and the contradictions that this largely inexplicit and unexamined notion spells out for women and children in classrooms, particularly working class children and their teachers. The starting point for this work was my own experience as a primary school teacher. I entered that enclosed place, the classroom by accident in 1973, quite unsocialised as a teacher. I think that had I been educated as a teacher I would have had access to ideas about deprivation and disadvantage that would have explained the children I encountered there in a particular way. It took me a very short time to discover, from reading as well as staffroom conversation, that the children of the semi- and unskilled working class that we taught were not like children ought to be, not 'real' children - though they represented a majority of children in this

Some implications of Winnicott's concept for clinical practice

Donald Winnicott's observations about mother/infant interactions and the importance of creating and maintaining a facilitating environment are useful ideas for clinical practice. In this paper Winnicott's fundamental assumptions about the holding environment, transitional space, and ego relatedness are described, and two familiar concepts, “True and False Self” and “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” are analyzed as they clarify and contribute to a better understanding of the interpersonal aspects of therapist/patient relationships. The case of a teenager and her parents is presented to describe how these concepts may be used in a direct practice situation.

Boundary and Space. An Introduction to the Work of D W Winnicott

Boundary and Space. An Introduction to the Work of D W Winnicott

Donald Winnicott

Donald Winnicott

Donald Winnicott. The President's view of a Past President.

Donald Winnicott. The President's view of a Past President.

An eclectic approach to regressional techniques

SUMMARY Regressive techniques are not new – Freud employed hypnoregression before developing psychoanalysis. Ferenczi probably holds the record for the longest regressive marathon, and Donald Winnicott appears to have published the first description of a “birth primal” in 1949. In the USA, two of Wilhelm Reich's students, Lowen and Peris, exerted a major influence on Arthur Janov, who has since popularised a three-week period of intensive regression. Most psychotherapists using primal techniques are more eclectic than Janov claims to be. The major reasons for the revival of intensive regressive techniques are that they may be a way to: 1) locate and change continuing interference from those pre-verbal experiences which produce neurotic symptoms 2) change psychotic experiences into growth experiences rather than use drugs to dampen symptoms. There are two areas of concern around the speed of regression to primary processes, namely, proceeding too rapidly or moving too slowly. If a person regresses too quickly into painful preverbal memories, he may either (a)get so frightened by the apparent chaos of the psychosomatic primal process that he withdraws prematurely thereby remaining a psychological cripple, or (b) falls prematurely into psychotic behaviour, which requires in-patient care in an institution which can support and guide the eruption of psychotic ideation and behaviour. Unfortunately, such institutions are currently in short supply. On the other hand, if a person proceeds too slowly through infantile regression, he may get “bogged down” in either intense psychosomatic pain, paralysing fear, or take flight into unproductive, repetitive acting-out behaviour. Eclectic techniques which generally can control the speed of regression include: 1) progressive desensitisation of psychosis-producing experiences; 2) establishing an especially strong rapport with a positive maternal figure either in the person of a therapist, another client, or the archetype of the “Great Mother” via dreams, art therapy, guided fantasy hypnosis, etc. The intense psychosomatic pain which is the most dramatic and fearful part of primal regression can be managed. One technique balances primal pain with primal pleasure – pleasure either old or new. “Old pleasure” involves remembering intensely pleasurable infantile experiences, which are usually more repressed than painful memories. “New pleasure” involves experiences such as skin massage from other group members; such experiences may be an antidote to a chronic lack of skin contact during infancy. The intense fear which usually accompanies primal regression can be largely managed by teaching the person to switch systematically between the four Jungian functions of Sensing, Intuiting, Feeling and Thinking and by exposing persons to maps of the unconscious such as those of Stanislav Grof and John Perry.

The Role of Donald Winnicott: Healing, Teaching, Nurture: A Review Article

Journal Article The Role of Donald Winnicott: Healing, Teaching, Nurture: A Review Article Get access ELIZABETH IRVINE ELIZABETH IRVINE Elizabeth Irvine graduated in Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge in 1927. After teaching for some years at the Malting House School, Cambridge, she took the Social Science Certificate and the Mental Health Certificate at the London School of Economics, obtaining the latter in 1932. She then worked as a Psychiatric Social Worker, mainly in Child Guidance, until 1966, when she left the Tavistock Clinic after 14 years to become Reader in Social Work at the University of York. She is currently editor of International Social Work and a Vice-President of the International Association for Child Psychiatry and Allied Professions Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 3, Issue 3, Autumn 1973, Pages 383–390, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjsw.a056424 Published: 01 October 1973

Tribute to Donald Winnicott

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Donald Winnicott. An appreciation.

Donald Winnicott. An appreciation.