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.
Donald Winnicott Today is the stimulating product of Jan Abram's mission to demonstrate the importance of D. W. Winnicott's legacy in the history and theory of psychoanalysis. Honorary Archivist of the Winnicott Trust and author of The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott's Use of Words (1996), Abram has written several chapters in the book under review, in addition to being editor of the volume. She has carefully selected a handful of Winnicott's talks and notes (including an excerpt of heretofore unpublished material) to introduce chosen secondary works on Winnicott. By using Winnicott's own notes to introduce segments of the book, Abram successfully keeps his voice firmly present throughout. She has republished classic analytic papers by such authors as Thomas Ogden, André Green, and Haydée Faimberg. More recent papers by authors spanning the globe and bridging professional disciplines highlight different aspects of Winnicott and the scope of his influence and inspiration.
Abram proposes a reconsideration of Winnicott's contribution as being revolutionary within the field of psychoanalysis and looks to its reintegration within the historical pantheon of ideas and theories. She places Winnicott in a theoretical lineage other than simply the Independent or Middle British Group and distances him from Melanie Klein and her followers. Citing André Green, she traces his theoretical frame back to Freud's 1895 Project for A Scientific Psychology, though she does not fully explicate the connection in this volume (p. 2). By drawing attention to the matrix between m/other and baby that is co-created, Abram argues, Winnicott has diverged from Freudian instinct theory to emphasize two-person relationships and the environment, and thus lays a foundation for the concept of subjectivity and for later intersubjective theories (p. 2).
The authors in Part 1, Introductory Overviews, delineate Winnicott's distinctive, even revolutionary, contributions. A well-known paper