Concluding Remarks

Perhaps one way to start a comparative dialogue on Bion and Winnicott's theories is to examine how their work can converge then veer away from each other. Both analysts were British contemporaries (; ), practiced (for the most) in London as members; and as Presidents of the British Psychoanalytical Society (Winnicott, , ; ). Both analysts were significantly influenced by the clinical theories of Melanie Klein - Winnicott was supervised by Klein from 1935 to 1939, while Bion was in a training analysis with Klein from 1946 to 1953; both analysts were influenced by Klein's lively ‘here and now’ analytic work with children - Winnicott worked with young children and adult patients, while Bion's practice was exclusively with adult patients. Winnicott eventually diverged from Klein's theories, disagreeing with her about the nature of the infant's early mental life, a process that started - as Caldwell points out - with Winnicott's (1945) ‘Primitive emotional development’ paper.

Winnicott and Klein would fundamentally disagree about the infant's early development - Winnicott taking Freud's line of primary narcissism, a bodily ego and a psyche that initially existed in an objectless world, while Klein adhered to the notion of a rudimentary sense of self from the outset of life. Bion would integrate Klein's paranoid/schizoid and depressive position work in a manner loyal to her programmatic agenda of the psychoanalytic understanding of psychotic states of mind - what Hinshelwood terms Bion's ‘part-object’ period, but later effected an overarching transformation of her clinical theories in the 1960s when he came to favour clinical intuition as an informing source of the psychoanalyst's insight into his patient's core conflicts and aspirations. We see this in Bion's clinical seminars that ensued after he moved to Los Angeles in 1968 (Bion, 2013, 2014, 2017).

While Winnicott went to great lengths to elucidate the patient's early history, particularly the infant and mother's inters