The Mantle of Freud: Was ‘The Use of an Object’ Winnicott's Todestrieb?

This paper considers the initial negative reaction to Winnicott's paper ‘On the use of an object’ in the light of its author's own reservations about it. It argues that its obscurities indicate Winnicott's own difficulties in articulating how the young child moves from subjectivity to the objective apprehension of the external world, and the part played in it by aggression. Particular attention is paid to Winnicott's interest in certain late texts of Freud where the ‘death instinct’ (Todestrieb) features prominently. It is suggested that Winnicott's interest, like Freud's, was prompted by the ambition of moving beyond psychopathology to formulate the outlines of a developmental psychology. Again like Freud it is argued that in this endeavour he was conceptually overreaching himself, though for different reasons. The paper concludes with some considerations about the inherently dual nature of any would-be comprehensive psychology of human understanding and behaviour, and of the necessarily partial contribution of psychodynamic theorizing towards it. The search for such a unitary psychoanalytic formula is what unites the two men.