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On November 12, 1968, Winnicott presented “The Use of an Object” to the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Few psychoanalytic scientific meetings before or since have achieved the legendary status of this evening. First-person accounts are passed on from one generation to the next. The paper was not well received, and Winnicott was disappointed by the reactions of the discussants. Why Winnicott had chosen to present this paper at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute remains an unanswered question, one that awaits a definitive Winnicott biography. The official minutes (Milrod, 1968) report that Winnicott had responded to the discussants “in a charming and whimsical fashion, saying his concept was torn to pieces and that he would be happy to give it up” (p. 6). Privately, he was heard to remark that he now understood better why America was in Vietnam (Goldman, 1993, p. 210). Another story, almost certainly apocryphal, is that when Winnicott got up to speak, he took out a toy gun and placed it on the podium where it would be visible, and said that it was for the next person who was to tell him that what he was doing was not psychoanalysis.
Of all Winnicott's papers, “The Use of an Object” (1969) is the most controversial and the most difficult to understand, yet it is one of his most important. Unlike many of his other concepts, such as the transitional object or the holding environment, the concept of object usage has only slowly made its way into the analytic vocabulary. Even Winnicott's admirers have expressed perplexity. Alexander Newman (1989) called it “a bafflingly attractive tease.” Winnicott plays with words, ideas, and sometimes with the reader. He creates paradoxical meanings in his use of language. For instance, the word “use,” a word that connotes exploitation, is used to designate the most mature form of object-relating. His use of everyday language for analytic theorizing outraged one of the discussants, Bernard Fine (1968), who stated that,