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In her paper ‘Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan’ Deborah Anna Luepnitz offers a brief account of the theories of Winnicott and Lacan, emphasizing the important differences between them. As Luepnitz says, ‘they represent two important ends of the analytic spectrum. Winnicott, it has been said, introduced the ‘comic tradition’ into psychoanalysis, in contrast to Freud's tragic vision’ (p. 960). Lacan, of course, subscribes to Freud's tragic vision in an even purer form, while Winnicott is basically an optimist.
According to Luepnitz, the contrast between the two naturally affects the practice of psychotherapy/analysis by the proponents of each. Winnicott believed that the right sort of ‘mirroring’ by the mother, that gleam of love in the mother's eye, brings forth the true self of the child. The mirroring that takes place communicates the sort of unconditional love that allows the bond of love and trust to form so that the child can become herself/himself without fearing rejection by the mother. If the mother is not ‘good-enough’, we have another opportunity to achieve wholeness with a good-enough analyst. Lacan's view is very different, as is his notion of mirroring. For him, we look in the mirror and see ourselves and are encouraged to take on/create a particular version of ourselves (often and in an ongoing way) as ‘me’. We look outward toward the other for our identities rather than inward, and each of these identities is false. There is no such thing as the true self, or a movement towards wholeness brought forth by the mother. In various ways, our identities are social. Indeed, the aspiration towards a true self is a support to capitalism, since it encourages greater consumption in hopes of feeling whole.
Clearly as goals, these are mutually exclusive, though they may overlap. For example, if you have been unlucky enough not to have a good-enough mother, you may have developed a number of false selves in hopes of pleasing her, and attention to this