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Gabrielle: “I want to see Dr. Winnicott. This time I will really tell him what's the matter.”
Mother: “Lucky that you know, most people don't.”
Gabrielle: “I don't know, but I can always tell him.”
Volume 11 of The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott contains two works: The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl and Human Nature. Both were unfinished at the time of Winnicott's death in January 1971, and both were published posthumously, in 1977 and 1988, respectively. My remarks will focus on The Piggle.
Reading The Piggle again after many years, I found myself, once more, fully engaged in this riveting account of a collaboration between a master child analyst and a very young, extremely precocious child, and her concerned and appealing parents. The Piggle is a remarkable clinical contribution. One hundred twenty-five pages long, it consists primarily of Winnicott's personal notes from his treatment of the Piggle (Gabrielle), a child he saw for sixteen sessions from the age of two years, five months, to the age of five years, two months. Gabrielle's parents called her Piggle, a common term of endearment for children in England. Because the child lived at a distance from London, Winnicott saw her at intervals of several weeks or even, at times, several months.
He calls this treatment “on demand,” implying that he would see the child only as she needed to be seen. Yet there were times that Gabrielle could not see Winnicott, even when she was struggling and wanted to see him. The parents were in close contact with the analyst, however, and they functioned as a bridge, providing the necessary support for an
intermittent, but in-depth, treatment. Gabrielle also had considerable strengths that allowed her to sustain continuity and momentum in the treatment, despite the long separations (Bürgin 2016).
The Piggle is divided into sixteen parts, each devoted to one of the sessions. Each section begins with detailed clinical proces