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These papers were given at the IPA Congress in Boston in July 2015 in a panel organized under the auspices of the Winnicott Trust to publicize the forthcoming Collected Works of Donald Winnicott (OUP, in press). The panel was organized by Lesley Caldwell (London) and chaired by Angela Joyce, Chair of the Winnicott Trust. It gathered together international speakers from Europe and North America: Dieter Bürgin (Basel), Lesley Caldwell (London), Adrienne Harris (New York), Dominique Scarfone (Montreal). By offering a reading of Winnicott through familiar and unfamiliar themes, the panel members aimed to offer ways of thinking that would prioritize the insights of psychoanalysis in a world increasingly challenged by social and cultural transformation. In these papers reproduced in the BJP we argue for the contemporary relevance of reading Donald Winnicott for an increased understanding of the demands of psychoanalytic work today.
The panel endorsed Winnicott's lasting contribution to psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic practice by building upon the forthcoming Collected Works. The emphases followed by all four speakers are located in a commitment to reading and rereading, to the challenge of encountering unfamiliar or previously unpublished work alongside classic papers. They aim to develop closer knowledge of the psychoanalytic terrain Winnicott made his own through approaching them in the context of familiar and unfamiliar themes and their relevance for a psychoanalysis of the present and the future.
In extending Winnicott's writings from an over-easy familiarity that may obstruct the contemporary uses of their exceptional aspects, the papers offer an unexpected set of encounters with this consummate clinician, by seeing the work anew and making it strange. The first presentation by Dominique Scarfone, based on his introduction to volume 4 of the Collected Works, argues for the value and the rewards of reading Winnicott slowly, a passionate plea for taking Winnico