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We can speak sensibly enough of Kleinians and Lacanians, and need not bat an eyelid in describing someone as a Freudian. But I am not at all sure what being a Winnicottian means. I found myself mulling this question over while reading Christopher Bollas’s 1980s Rome lectures, recently published as Essential Aloneness . Is Bollas now or has he ever been a Winnicottian? The more insidious implications of my question are evident in its McCarthyite tenor. I should like to loosen the question from its accusatory or persecutory moorings, however, and use it instead as a way of approaching the lectures in a spirit of free inquiry. As Daniel Widlöcher has pointed out, no other psychoanalyst has considered more deeply than Winnicott the path that remains open in subjective experience via the
freedom of thought and its creative potential. As heir to this thinking and one of the pre-eminent carriers of its creative impetus, does this make Bollas a Winnicottian? And does the question itself have any meaning?
The first thing to ask about any book is how to read it; the question of meaning, while ultimately pivotal, is always secondary. To the extent that Bollas invents the person that he discovers in Winnicott, Essential Aloneness may be read as an act of finding out on the one hand and of imaginative re-description on the other. An invention isn’t all one’s own doing but belongs together with the discoverable world, a paradox that Bollas effectively acknowledges in describing how the lectures “wander off” (ix) into an engagement with matters of particular concern to him. Wanderings off lead Bollas into discussions of some of his key concepts as creative elaborations on Winnicott: the mother as a transformational object; informative object relating or subject relations theory; the unfolding of personal idiom; and, above all, the unthought known. The latter represents Bollas’s reworking of Winnicott’s momentous identification of “a fundamental unalterable and inherent aloneness