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Some years ago an image crossed my mind, and I wrote about “a tale of two Freuds.” What I meant was the tension between Freud the sensitive and open-minded listener to subjective individual experience, deeply influenced by literature and art, and Freud the ambitious conquistador who strove to make absolute generalizations about universal human nature (Berman 2003). Personally, I feel we should always be loyal to the first Freud, but examine critically the conclusions of the second.
My “tale of two Winnicotts” relates to another fundamental tension, between Winnicott the daring and original revolutionary and a Winnicott who often made enormous efforts to remain loyal to the heritage of classical psychoanalysis. This effort led at times to absurd statements; maybe the sharpest example is concluding his radically innovative paper about true and false self (Winnicott 1960; CW 6:1:22)1 with the sentence “As far as I can see it involves no important change in basic theory.”
When I explored volume 5 of the Collected Works, as I was asked by the editors, I had this tension in mind. The period covered here, 1955-1959, reviewed broadly and thoughtfully by Jennifer and Marcus Johns in their introduction to the volume, follows on two major changes in Winnicott's life: his gradual separation from the Kleinian group in the 1940s, and his marriage with his second wife Clare in 1951. Both of these changes increased to my mind his personal and professional autonomy. Within this period (in 1956) he was elected to his first three-year term as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society (the second term started in 1965). My impression is that this role strengthened his wish to be part