A Response to William Meredith-Owen

In my paper I tried to reveal significant flaws in Winnicott's twin-pronged diagnosis/critique of Jung and analytical psychology. I also looked into the question of why Winnicott's approach should have become authoritative within some Jungian circles.

In response to my article, Meredith-Owen, despite owning a tendency to ‘damn Jung with faint praise’, remains convinced of his ‘theoretical ground’. I don't have the space to address the subtlety and complexity of all his points here.1 I shall therefore concentrate upon an argument which seems to me important: the suggestion that Winnicott's diagnosis of pathological dissociation in Jung was not only accurate but, more importantly, therapeutic, in that it was underpinned by Winnicott's own personal struggles with and eventual resolution of the problem of dissociation.

Meredith-Owen points out that, in his review of MDR, Winnicott was using ‘Jung’ as a parallel figure through whom he could work out ‘analogous issues in himself’. However, this immediately begs a key question: to what extent and in what way were these issues truly analogous? Meredith-Owen is attempting to convince us that Jung and Winnicott were ‘fellow travellers’ in ‘their respective struggles with dissociation’. But this assertion itself relies upon Winnicott's assumption that what Jung was describing in MDR was a largely unsuccessful struggle with the problem of pathological dissociation.

My question is this: if Meredith-Owen is right to suggest that Winnicott's interest in Jung was, at least in part, a function of his personal need to tackle issues of dissociation and ‘unassimilated aggression’, then is it not plausible that Winnicott's need might have seriously distorted his image of Jung - particularly when combined with a dogmatic commitment to a psychoanalytic model of the psyche? Might it not be the case that Winnicott unconsciously required Jung to have failed to resolve his own issues of dissociation and ‘unassimilated aggression’ precisely so th