You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The psychoanalysts best known to psychobiographers are Sigmund Freud and Erik H. Erikson. Most practicing psychoanalysts honor Freud as the founder of the field and respect Erikson but rely on the two of them in doing clinical work far less than on later authors. Psychobiographers, much like clinical psychoanalysts, could benefit from making use of post-Freudian, post-Eriksonian theorists.
This essay is an examination of how the perspectives of Donald W. Winnicott, Otto Kernberg, and Heinz Kohut can be used in psychobiography. I chose to write about these theorists because, in my estimation, they have the highest combined ranking on two criteria: their impact on psychoanalysis in recent years and the amount they have to offer to psychobiographers.
Winnicott (1896-1971) was neither the leader of a school of thought nor a systematic theoretician, but he developed a series of ideas that seem only to gain in influence as time goes on. As Frank Summers (1994, pp. 137-190), one of the most astute expositors of Winnicott, has pointed out, Winnicott presented a system of ideas on development, psychopathology, and treatment that work together as a coherent whole, although he never attempted to develop a comprehensive theory of personality as Freud, and perhaps Kohut, did.
Winnicott's work starts with his concepts of the True Self and the False Self (Winnicott, 1965, pp. 140-152). I believe that Winnicott was not trying to describe mental structures—like Freud's id, ego, and superego—but rather used these