Winnicott's Ideas Research Articles

Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Homelessness.

Psychoanalysis is often viewed as a practice relevant only to educated people of means. This article describes a project that matches psychoanalytically trained clinicians with unhoused and formerly unhoused adults in a large urban community. D. W. Winnicott's ideas about impingement, the holding environment, fear of breakdown, and careful monitoring of the analyst's interiority have proven to be most valuable theoretical and clinical tools. A decade-long case example demonstrates the challenges and healing potentials of the work.

Narcissism and the Lure of Grandiosity Over Reality: Reflections on a Narcissistic Inhibition in Creativity

This article explores a creative inhibition where, in order to preserve a grandiose artistic fantasy, actual engagement with the creative process is avoided. The inhibition seems linked to some forms of narcissism. These individuals value artistic production, wish to be great artists themselves, but have severe difficulties engaging with the creative process. Attention is drawn to Ovid's account of Narcissus whose awareness of himself only comes about as he disturbs the water and his reflection is fragmented and disappears. This shattering of the perfect image is described as a potential narcissistic wound inflicted on a fantasy of artistic grandeur. The inhibition is illustrated with literary examples from the writing of Honore de Balzac and Henry James, and further explored with clinical material with clients with a creative inhibition. A comparison is made with Winnicott's idea of dissociative fantasy. It is suggested that successful creative activity requires a negative capability (Keats, 1817), a secondary process that gives coherence to creative endeavour to produce an aesthetic resonance. The narcissistic individuals discussed here seem to lack this negative capability leading to an experience which inflicts a massive narcissistic wound if they try to engage with the creative process.

Phenotypic aspects and their emotional impacts on subjects with Turner syndrome and their parents

The present article aims to offer Turner Syndrome subjects and their families some orientations related to possible emotional difficulties during their development. Thus familiar constitution is highlighted for its importance. Turner Syndrome (TS) etiology is genetic, associated to partial or total monosomy of X chromosome. TS are prevalent in women and is generally diagnosed during adolescence.1,2 TS subjects and their parents usually experience challenging times when they are informed about the diagnosis. Parents feel breaking expectations of the ideally imagined child. TS girls, teenagers and women may also feel the painful losses they may be in contact with. Frustration and deception reactions are associated with such moments and are equivalent to mourning feeling. Other feelings may arise needing support to elaboration and emotional overcome. We resort to Winnicott's ideas for presenting a solid psychoanalytic theory that presents a comprehensive reading of situations with the purpose of guidance. Considering the genetic profile, a great phenotypic variability can occur, with the most frequent characteristics of TS being: short stature, obesity, infertility due to the decline of ovarian reserves and comorbidities such as hypothyroidism, osteoporosis. Different cognitive changes may occur.2 These elements justify the need for specialized work such as that of the psychologist and the psychopedagogue. By relating the emotional impact of these issues, it is suggested the development of a Guide to help families and TS subjects.

When is it time to stop? When good enough becomes bad enough.

This article draws on Winnicott's concept of the good enough mother to discuss how to know whether a therapeutic situation is good enough to continue or bad enough to end. This dilemma is explored in terms of clinical syndromes, such as anorexia and pathological gambling, but focuses mainly on analyst-initiated endings, which are termed the 'Casablanca dilemma', based on an amplification of the ending of the film Casablanca. The author goes on to discuss such one-sided endings, drawing on interviews with 40 analysts and therapists about their clinical experience. A typology of bad enough endings is presented. The psychological differences between a good enough analysis as opposed to a bad enough one are explored through the ideas of Winnicott and Neumann.

What alive means: On Winnicott’s “transitional objects and transitional phenomena”

ABSTRACT In his reading of Winnicott's “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena,” the author views Winnicott as engaged in offering a way of conceiving of the fundamentally human task of creating states of being in which the individual's ideas, feelings, and bodily sensations come to feel alive and real to him or her. The author proposes that the concept of paradox captures something of both the idea and the experience of transitional objects and phenomena. The author then looks closely at the new clinical illustration that Winnicott presents in the fourth and final version of his paper. He discusses what he views as Winnicott's most evolved form of clinical practice. The author also takes up Winnicott's idea of “the negative,” a state of being in which the gap, the amnesia, the death is all that feels real, while the presence or memory of the object feels unreal. The author offers an illustration of clinical work in which a significant alteration of the analytic frame provides a context in which the patient is able to begin to experience feelings that feel real and alive to him.

Play and the affective space of hope in Hani Abu-Assad's The Idol

The Idol by Palestinian filmmaker Hani Abu-Assad is a film that is inspired by the true story of Mohammed Assaf, a young man from Gaza who became a sensation in Palestine when he won the Arab Idol contest in 2013. Abu-Assad's rendition of the story in The Idol is not faithful to real life, but instead offers an affective lens to Assaf's extraordinary rise to fame.My paper will argue that Palestinian attachment to Assaf expresses an enigmatic longing for hope. Notwithstanding articulable desires for better futures under unbearable socio-political realities of everyday life in Gaza, Assaf's journey to fame offered not so much optimism for a better future but the affective space for Palestinians to dream and playfully come together. Dubbed “Palestine's Dream,” Assaf's success sparked a desire in Palestinians to feel joy. In the film, Assaf's inspiration was his defiant and gender queer sister. Theorizing her defiance through D.W. Winnicott's ideas on the origins of creativity, play, and a “good enough environment,” this paper claims that her queer affect is transmitted to her brother as an ineffable wish for something otherwise. In this way, The Idol posits the source of hope in imaginative creation in excess of familiar narratives.

Just imagine! The transformative potential of the imagination and its place in psychotherapy

In this article the author explores the use of imagination and clinical intuition in psychotherapy. She discusses the functions of imagination and how the capacity to be creative and for flexible imagining emerges within a secure attachment relationship in early childhood. Winnicott's ideas are important here. She also discusses what happens when trauma or relationship failings compromise the transitional space and uses case examples to illustrate some responses to this breakdown. To set the scene the author discusses changing views on illusion and imagination from Freud onwards to the present day when we are informed by recent findings in neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology. It is richly illustrated with theory and case material.

Of Distance and Desire: The Many Metamorphoses of George Michael and the Origins of his Creativity

This paper argues for George Michael's significance to contemporary culture, a significance that requires a radical reinterpretation of his life. My discussion suggests that what is at stake in understanding Michael's life is a pattern of internalized homophobia. The method of this paper is to trace the double structure of his consciousness – his awareness of his role as icon and his private state of despair – by isolating moments in both parts of his life. From these, I attempt to extract an understanding of Michael's inner world that found expression in his lyrics. These encounters I explore in light of Kohut's theory of narcissism and Winnicott's ideas of transitional objects. In addition, George Michael's later years were defined by two losses, that of his lover and that of his mother. Michael's relationship to his grief is the focus of this essay. Drawing upon the biographies that have been written about George Michael and the interviews he gave over his career, I attempt to trace the origin of his depression to his early encounters with loss. These losses, I maintain, were reactivated at the peak of Michael's fame and led ultimately to withdrawal and artistic silence in his final years.

Using Winnicott or Finding Winnicott?

The author suggests, in the title, a difference between using Winnicott's ideas, as in applying them, and finding Winnicott in clinical work. It is in finding examples that resonate to his ideas that we can see most directly what Winnicott had been writing about. And it is at those times of finding Winnicott that his ideas most vividly come alive.

Psychoanalytic Underpinnings of Socially-Shared Normativity.

Alongside social anthropology and discursive psychology, conversation analysis has highlighted numerous ways in which cultural forms of perceiving and acting in the world are primarily rooted in socially shared normativity. However, when consideration turns to the origins and purposes of human affect and emotion, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis appear to face particular difficulties that arise from the over-arching focus on sense-making practices. This article considers the proposal that psychoanalytic thinking might inform our understanding of how socially shared normativity emerges during infancy and early childhood. First, a framework is sketched out that highlights the fact that from the beginning, an infant’s earliest experience is bound up with those procedures, practices, and social actions that make up what conversation analysts call members’ methods. Second, comparisons are drawn between conversation analysis and psychoanalytic accounts of early experience for infants during the first years of life. Discussion then moves to the Kleinian notion of object relations and the concept of projective identification. Essentially, this is a theoretical account of how “what-was-once-one” (the mother-infant unit) somehow differentiates resulting in the gradual emergence of the “individuated being.” What is often glossed over in this account is the discursively embedded nature of projective identification; a process that is itself interdependent with the embodiment that makes up the infant’s lived engagement with the world. Whatever might constitute consciousness emerges from somatic, embodied, material-physical, tactile/affective experience – that is, a fundamentally social milieu. Ultimately, this raises the question of how transformation (i.e., from the social to the individual) occurs. One answer may be Winnicott’s idea of the transitional space, where the “good-enough” parent is said to be somebody, who can “contain” both negative and positive identifications coming from the infant, transform and re-project such identifications, but in modified form. In this way, the infant begins to recognize/experience what it is they are “feeling.” Such projective identifications are conveyed within and through the prevailing discourses that constitute all social practices. Concluding comments note that conversation analysis may find in psychoanalytic thinking a framework for understanding the interdependence between affect and action, given that in psychoanalytic thought, we find a thoroughly relational conception of human nature.

When Hunger Strikes: Rethinking Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" in Light of Winnicott's Theory of the Psyche-Soma.

Winnicott's perspective on psychosomatic illness as a phenomenon that bridges the unconscious and the conscious will be discussed using, using clinical material and Kafka's short story "A Hunger Artist." The author makes use of Winnicott's ideas in discussing the idea that psychosomatic symptoms, or illness, are not necessarily a form of acting out in need of elimination, but a nonverbal "language" in need of a listener. The author describes clinical cases in which the psychosomatic symptom was treated as a sign of something that went wrong within the mother-infant relationship, which has awaited a good-enough environmental provision to enable the creation of a new meaning.

Birds of Paradise and Other Transitional Phenomena

This essay explores Dante's idea of trasumanar, “going beyond the human,” through a vertical reading of cantos 23 of the Commedia. It examines how Dante relies on bodies and their sensory experiences to explain heavenly paradise and the ineffable. The essay invokes D. W. Winnicott's idea of transitional phenomena to understand the cognitive activity of reading as an act of creativity and collaboration.

‘YouCanTake it With You’: Transitions and Transitional Objects in Psychotherapy with Children Who have Learning Disabilities

This paper will consider what impact a learning disability may have on development and transition in a child's life. With reference to Hollins and Sinason's ‘Three secrets’ (2000), Alvarez's ‘Levels of psychoanalytic work’ (2012), and attachment theory, I will reflect on the development of the self when there is learning disability. The paper will go on to relate Winnicott's paper, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’ (1953) to the theory and practice of integrative arts child psychotherapy (IACP). In IACP, objects, play and creativity form a central part of the treatment. Drawing on clinical material from my long-term treatment of two young people in particular, I will link the therapeutic effect of objects with Winnicott's ideas about creativity, aggression, motivation and the expression of self. In the paper I set out how, through the therapeutic use of objects and what I call, ‘object games’ we were able to address the children's experiences of trauma as well as the impact of their disabilities. I will describe the changes I saw in the internal worlds of my patients which in turn led to significant and positive changes in their relationships with self and with others. These changes came, over time, to allow them greater independence and self-determination in everyday life.

ORPHA, ORPHIC FUNCTIONS, AND THE ORPHIC ANALYST: WINNICOTT'S "REGRESSION TO DEPENDENCE" IN THE LANGUAGE OF FERENCZI.

Early developmental trauma is imprinted in the psyche by survival fragmentation and dissociation. Traumatized patients need the analyst to be actively involved and allow for regression to dependence in order to strengthen, create and construct their psychic functioning and structure so that environmental failures will be contained and not rupture continuity of being. I suggest that Ferenczi's and Winnicott's ideas about regression to dependence in analysis are fundamental contributions to these quests, and that Ferenczi set the foundation, which Winnicott further explored and developed. I would like to focus on their clinical theory of treating early developmental trauma of the psyche, describing it in the less known language of Ferenczi, reviving his concept of Orpha and its functions. The complementarities of the two approaches can enrich and broaden our understanding of the clinical complications that arise in the analysis of such states.

From Persecution to Depression: A Case of Chronic Depression—Associating the Rorschach, the TAT, and Winnicott

In this article, I discuss a case study of a patient with depression, paranoid ideation, and other psychiatric difficulties who presented in a state of acute crisis. I review the Swiss Lausanne model of Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) interpretation, focusing on a psychoanalytic understanding of special contents and verbalizations. I then present a review of Comprehensive System (Exner, 2003) Structural Summary variables based on a modified Rorschach administration, while qualifying the meanings of these variables in light of the modified procedure. I conclude with a review of Winnicott's (1969) ideas on the paranoid potential, tie it to the main points of the case, and offer a 5-year follow-up of the patient's treatment. The case offers an approach to personality assessment that is informed by an international theory built on psychology and philosophy, and offers support for the use of an alternative theory-based, psychoanalytic method of data analysis.

"There's no such thing as a patient": reflections on the significance of the work of D. W. Winnicott for modern inpatient psychiatric treatment.

The writings of D. W. Winnicott, British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, focus on the details of the early dyadic mother-child relationship and how impingements on the smooth unfolding of the developmental process can lead to psychopathology. Several of his concepts, such as holding environment and transitional object, have permeated into psychiatric theory and practice. The scope of his creative theoretical and clinical thinking goes far beyond these well-known terms and has particular relevance to the acute inpatient psychiatric setting. This article outlines the significance of Winnicott's major ideas and how they can be used to better understand the mutative factors of inpatient treatment, to illuminate complex clinical interactions, and to assist in guiding care of psychiatric inpatients.

The imaginative elaboration of body functioning and maternal holding: Winnicott and the formation of the psyche-soma

Since the concept of imaginative elaboration of body functioning, which is essential to Winnicott's idea of psyche-soma, has rarely been investigated up to now, this article sets out to do this and tries to pursue the meaning and articulation of that concept in the corpus of Winnicott's theory. In this way, it contributes to bringing the body to the core of psychoanalytical theory.

Reading Winnicott into Nano-Psychoanalysis: “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom”

This article presents Winnicott's unique theoretical and clinical thinking, and especially his revision of the foundations of clinical psychoanalysis, as a Kuhnian paradigm shift that, as the title of the article indicates, I term nano-psychoanalysis. The title refers to ideas and terminology borrowed from nanoscience and nanotechnology, and particularly to physicist Richard Feynman's 1959 visionary talk that hailed nanotechnology and its radical potential: “There's plenty of room at the bottom—An Invitation to Enter a new Field of Physics.” I have paraphrased and applied it to Winnicott and to psychoanalysis: “There's plenty of room at the bottom—an invitation to enter nano-psychoanalysis,” and regard Winnicott as the originator of nano-psychoanalysis. For Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory, and particularly his clinical-technical theory with its emphasis on regression in the treatment of more disturbed patients, share the fundamental principle offered by Feynman and nanotechnology—that of going back to the bottom, to the elemental early states and processes, and to early mothering techniques, thereby enabling the initiation of formative developmental processes. This means moving beyond the space-time confines of traditional clinical psychoanalysis to work with primal processes in the treatment experience and setting, thus reaching and correcting basic self-processes and unthinkable early trauma—and enlarging the scope of psychoanalytic practice. It is a quest for clinical psychoanalysis at its most formative edge. The article explores the radical vision of Winnicott's clinical thinking and his theory of regression, comparing it to the psychoanalytic thinking of his two contemporaries—Balint in London and Nacht in Paris—who also dealt with the ideas of primary states and therapeutic regression in the psychoanalytic situation, but with rather restrained and cautious clinical-theoretical conclusions. Winnicott's 1955 letter to Bion, and the story of the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter offer further points of relating to Winnicott's singular ideas.

Psychotherapy on the couch: Exploring the fantasies of In Treatment

This article explores the circulation of fantasy in the television drama, In Treatment. Drawing on Roger Silverstone's application of Winnicott's ideas to the socio-cultural role of television in everyday life, it takes up a psycho-cultural position on the role of television in the context of the broad cultural agreement that we now exist in a highly mediatised age. The article examines the implications for experiences of identity, and suggests that media have become psychological objects of the inner world and serve to allay the anxieties and contradictions of contemporary culture.

Against Matricide: Rethinking Subjectivity and the Maternal Body

In this article I critically re‐examine Julia Kristeva's view that becoming a speaking subject requires psychical matricide: violent separation from the maternal body. I propose an alternative, non‐matricidal conception of subjectivity, in part by drawing out anti‐matricidal strands in Kristeva's own thought, including her view that early mother–child relations are triangular. Whereas she understands this triangle in terms of a first imaginary father, I re‐interpret this triangle using Donald Winnicott's idea of potential space and Jessica Benjamin's idea of an intersubjective space of thirdness. I argue that this space provides a maternal third term: a relation of connection and difference between two, a relation that inherits the affective, mobile, generative qualities of the maternal body as the infant (according to Kristeva) imagines it. This connecting space allows both mothers and children to emerge as subjects in their own right. I then suggest that potential‐maternal space expands into language, so that language intrinsically allows the possibility of a speaking position of connection with the mother. Entrance into language need not entail separation or matricide: the problem is not language as such but the particular way that speech and logos have been defined historically.