On Winnicott's Clinical Innovations in the Analysis of Adults

I cannot assume, of course, that the way in which my ideas have developed has been followed by others, but I should like to point out that there has been a sequence, and the order that there may be in the sequence belongs to the evolution of my work.

The development of Winnicott's thinking over the course of his career, reflected in his extensive oeuvre, demonstrates an extraordinary internal coherence. In this paper I will focus my remarks on only on what I have defined as “the clinical Winnicott”. By this I mean those aspects or areas of Winnicott's thinking that permit us to consider his specifically clinical contribution usually neglected and not sufficiently valued with respect to the Winnicott who produced enormous contributions to the psychoanalytic theory of development (Abram, 1996) or to the Winnicott who is considered only in the light of his monumental and highly influential theory of transitional space.

My conviction, in contrast to the emphasis in the literature, is that Winnicott's clinical thinking and practice form the basis upon which the author constructed his theory of infant development in relation to the environment, as well as his important contributions on the birth and development of the self and on the transitional area. The concept of transitional space is revolutionary not only because it broadens the scope of clinical psychoanalysis, but also because Winnicott “invented” it with the aim of locating those objects that, in the theory of his time, did not exist because there was no space into which to position them or to see them. These objects are what Winnicott sees and interprets, but other analysts, not equipped with his theory, cannot gain access to them (Bollas, 2007).

In focusing on the clinical Winnicott I will be referring here to what I consider a sort of generative core in Winnicott's ideas, a crucial “object” in his clinical thinking that may even have been unknown to the author himself, which has bee