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Fadi Abou-Rihan’s Finding Winnicott – Philosophical Encounters with the Psychoanalytic is composed of six chapters plus an introductory first chapter in which he presents his general aim and method. The chapters (two of which have been published previously) read more like independent essays, each tackling a specific aspect of his main project, that of “finding Winnicott” – a suggestive title that turns Winnicott’s paradoxical insights concerning how the infant “finds” the object onto Winnicott’s theory. As is well known, Winnicott writes in Playing and Reality that “the baby creates the object, but the object was there waiting to be created and to become a cathected object” (Winnicott 1971, 89). Somewhat cheekily, Abou-Rihan suggests that reading Winnicott requires following the exact same process. The main thrust of my review will be concerned with this fundamental aspect of his book.
This Winnicottian inspiration does not extend to Abou-Rihan’s use of language, however. In spite of his “particular use of the English vernacular”, as Jan Abram puts it (J. Abram, The Surviving Object: Psychoanalytic clinical essays on psychic survival-of-the-object (Routledge, ), xxiii), Winnicott’s language is famously characterized by its apparent simplicity and accessibility to non-specialists. Abou-Rihan, on the other hand, makes use of technical language and his perspective is distinctly philosophical, as evidenced for instance by the abstract chapter titles (Rationales – Findings – Series – Solitudes – Games – Spaces – Properties) or indeed the subtitle (Philosophical Encounters with the Psychoanalytic). In doing so, his aim is twofold. First, he intends to put Winnicott in dialogue with philosophy since, in his view, “less attention has been paid to the intersections between Winnicott’s thought and certain currents within the broader philosophical tradition” than between his work and “other figures in the [analyti