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Winnicott is one of those men who changed my life. I would like to share with you some of the writings that helped me. I have written elsewhere of my meeting with him in 1968 before he spoke in New York (Eigen and Govrin, 2007). I began reading Winnicott in the 1960s and he is one of the few analytic writers I have continued to read closely for sustenance, inspiration and learning. Over forty years of reading Winnicott and not a sign of being tired of him. On the contrary, like reading Rilke, his words open realities, create or discover realities.
There is much in his work I am leaving out: transitional experiencing, illusion-disillusion, paradox, play, psychesoma, vital spark, incommunicado core, unaliveness, being alone together, unintegration, fear of breakdown, creativity, to name a few. At another time, another mood, I might have chosen any of them, or others, to write about. The present communication focuses on three areas that teach me much about clinical work and living as I grow older, now the same age as Winnicott when he died. The more I dwell with them, the deeper they go: writings on use of the object, aloneness, and madness.
Before jumping in, I'd like to comment on a particular atmospheric background of his work. Perhaps it is my temperament or sensibility, but very early in my reading of Winnicott I felt a sense of relief. As I looked closely at this relief, one of the ingredients I noticed was a lack of contempt for dependency in his work. This was rare in my experience up to that point. I felt a certain judgmental, even moralistic quality when it came to “regression”, “pre-Oedipal”, “paranoid-schizoid” tendencies. Emphasis was on “making the Oedipal”, “making the depressive position”, with a kind of shame attached to “inferior” levels of development. I could breathe more freely with Winnicott, with myself, with my patients, take people more readily as they are without demeaning judgments, stay with what is, opening fields of experience.
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