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Reading Ruthless Winnicott: The Role of Ruthlessness in Psychoanalysis and Political Protest was my first encounter with the work of South African psychoanalytic psychotherapist and academic Dr Sally Swartz, and I was captivated. To date, Swartz's body of work appears to have been principally focused on the traumatic impact of colonialism (Louw & Swartz, 2001; Swartz, 1999a,1999b,1999c, 2000, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018; Swartz & Ismail, 2001), and in this volume she draws on the ideas of Winnicott, the eminent British theorist of early infancy and childhood, to fertilise and support her thinking about individual and collective trauma in the context of South African university protest movements.
Bold leaps and links are made between the clinical and personal (rooted in and emerging out of Winnicott's psychoanalytic work with children in London) and South Africa's historical and ongoing struggles with the effects of colonialism and decolonisation, and she draws on the writing of French West Indian, Frantz Fanon , a psychiatrist and revolutionary writer opposed to colonialism, to strengthen her Winnicottian-based arguments.
What drew me most was Swartz's intellectual rigour combined with a warm and generous humanity. Not only does she write beautifully, but her thinking is bold, complex, and fresh, while also clear and unpretentious. Swartz writes appreciatively of Winnicott's own ruthless insistence on the value of his paradoxical theory of ruthlessness: in order to become a subject and to develop concern or “ruth”—for the Other, he argues, prior ruthless attack of the object is called for and it is absolutely essential that the object survives the attack “without collapse into compliance or retaliation” (p. 2). Swartz argues that just as the individual must make a ruthless bid for freedom of the subjective self, those traumatised by colonialism must ruthlessly attack in order to gain their freedom and, crucially, those attacked must survive. Her leaps are not wild, but clo