A Brief History of Illusion: Milner, Winnicott and Rycroft

Illusion is a word that Raymond Williams might have included among his list of keywords of British culture, since it is a word that discloses ‘both continuity and discontinuity, and also deep conflicts of value and belief’ within its intellectual and political history (1983, p. 23). It is a banner under which the meaning of that culture has frequently been contested. The author indicates some of the more significant of these contests, with occasional glances at the wider European context and with special reference to the history of psychoanalysis, where the conflicts that characterise the larger history of the word have been interestingly re-enacted. In particular, the author explores its significance for the English psychoanalysts Marion Milner and Charles Rycroft and, more centrally, for Donald Winnicott, not least because in Winnicott's case it is a word that has been treated only peripherally in the two books that are organised around the study of his language, Alexander Newman's Non-Compliance in Winnicott's Words and Jan Abram's The Language of Winnicott .