Response by Charles Hanly

The recent series of papers on Winnicott's technical innovations (Abram, 2012; Blass, 2012; Bonaminio, 2012; Eigen, 2012) provides us with interesting reflections on Winnicott's contribution to adult analysis.2 It raises the question of whether the importance Winnicott attaches to the analyst's role of providing good enough parenting is consistent with a traditional or classical view of psychoanalysis. If Freud and Klein affirm the primacy of interpretation of the dynamic psychic unconscious in the analytic cure, as I believe they do (Hanly, 1994), then the answer would have to be that Winnicott's view is not consistent with a traditional view of psychoanalysis. In what follows I will explain my reasoning.

Although Grunbaum exaggerated Freud's reliance on the tally argument, there is no question that Freud considered the sound interpretations of what is actively unconscious in the patient in the analysis as the primary and indispensable instruments of therapeutic efficacy. Freud (1914, 1917, 1937a, 1940) did not disregard the fact that psychoanalysis is a human relation, but he was primarily concerned with considerations about the possibility of analytic collaboration, rather than with advocating building a relationship in which the analyst is able, by means of empathy or emotional responsiveness, to provide the patient with what life has deprived him/her (except in so far as the analysis can enable him/her to mourn its loss and to find substitute satisfactions in present life). Similarly, Freud (1914) realized that the therapeutic results he sought could not be achieved simply by the analyst putting conflicts, unconscious wishes and symptoms into words. If the necessary maturation of instinctual organizations were to take place, then these words had to be found by the patient in the transforming affect of the work of association during analysis. In this painful struggle, Freud consistently sees the analyst's role as attending to the patient's process of repetition