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In recent years there has been increasing acceptance in psychoanalysis, as in other disciplines, that meanings that appear to be opposed are often better understood as complementary. The psychology of “both/and” replaces the psychology of “either/or.” In psychoanalysis, this trend can be traced to Winnicott's argument for the far-ranging significance of paradox in psychic life, and for the corresponding centrality of what he called “play” and “potential space.”
But as important as Winnicott has become in American psychoanalysis—especially, perhaps, to analysts such as Stuart Pizer, who think of themselves as relational—he remains quintessentially British. Pizer refers to him, for example, as “that artful dodger of a psychoanalytic author, comfortably nestled in a British literary tradition that conveyed sense through nonsense” (p. 5). Which is to say that it is unlikely that Winnicott's dense and allusive writings would have been produced by an American psychoanalyst. Winnicott is nevertheless there at the heart of this otherwise very American book. In its pragmatism, precision, and directness it is as characteristic of the psychoanalysis of this country today (at least the relational/interpersonal strand of it) as Winnicott's work was of the Britain of his time. Pizer appreciates the allusiveness of language and the elusiveness of meaning; but where Winnicott responded to these phenomena with poetry, Pizer's response is to strive for clarity in a literate prose in which he nevertheless appreciates poetry (and quotes some).