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In 1964 Donald Woods Winnicott, a sixty-eight-year-old, once scintillating psychoanalyst in the twilight of his life, afflicted with severe heart disease and angina, his career fading toward darkness, enters into a therapeutic encounter with a two-year-old girl nicknamed “the Piggle,” who night and day struggles with gusts of psychotic rage and depression following the birth of a hated sister. It is my premise that in the treatment that follows it is not just that Winnicott heals the girl according to the traditional treatment paradigm; it is that in the process they act as change agents for each other. In an imperfect but effective therapeutic endeavor, old man and young child join together to overcome their mutual preoccupation with death and destruction and to set things right in a way that allows the Piggle to rejoin life stronger than ever and permits Winnicott to start to reconcile his remarkably lively life with his impending death. “Piggle” means “pickle.” Ironically, both parties here are in one, and each helps the other out of it.
Through many readings over many years, I have been struck by how much this story resonates with two plays in Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy. In Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone guides her father, Oedipus, blind and approaching death, to a sacred grove where with her assistance he sheds his remorse and dies a death sanctioned by the gods. Both father and daughter are changed in the process. In Antigone's case her maturation in courage, altruism, and morality becomes the subject of the final play, Antigone. In parallel fashion to the Sophoclean plays, I am suggesting, the Piggle became Winnicott's Antigone, instancing a universal feature of therapeutic engagements: change occurs differentially in them, but each party is changed.
When I was seventeen I took Sigmund Freud for my first psychoanalytic lover. Who knew? There were no intellectual bones in my family's body.