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If you would listen, that would be best.
It was with a significant amount of both trepidation and excited anticipation that I took on the task of reviewing a book titled Finding the Piggle. Having spent the majority of my adult professional life reading and rereading Winnicott, teaching and reteaching Winnicott to doctoral psychology students, writing and rewriting about him (Tuber 2008), and, more important, loving him as a clinician, a theoretician, and a mensch of the highest order, I felt that being able to approach Corinne Masur's edited volume in an open-minded and open-hearted way would prove difficult indeed. Could Winnicott stand up to the potential criticism of these authors, and could I? Or, conversely, would it be yet another idealization or, worse yet, overly simplistic rendition of “the Great Man”?
Equally drawing me to the task was that I had not reread The Piggle since graduate school, some forty years ago. It had in fact just been published in my second year of graduate school and provided me my first model of who I wanted to be as a clinician, as Winnicott's playfulness commingled with his warmth and depth of humanity in a way I had not yet thought possible as I absorbed Freud and his circle and the new “upstarts” in the field, Kernberg and Kohut.
My first order of business therefore was to reread The Piggle, and there are a number of points I want to make about this great work before tackling Masur and her contributors.
In their eleventh consultation together, Piggle begins by noting that her baby sister can understand things better now with age. Winnicott asks Piggle: “would it be better if I didn't talk,” to which Piggle replies, “If you would listen, that would be best.” Winnicott: “Shall I talk or listen?” Piggle: “Listen!”
This interchange speaks volumes about both therapist and patient. For Winnicott, his readily admitting (by asking the first question) that he often interpreted too much too quickly to Piggle was both humble and
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