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Deconstructing the words of Winnicott in order to read his papers with fresh eyes is nothing new to Thomas Ogden. He has already undertaken this task very creatively with both ‘Primitive Emotional Experience’ (2001) and ‘Fear of Breakdown’ (2014). It is arguable that ‘The use of an object and relating through identifications’ is Winnicott's most challenging and difficult paper and, as Ogden points out, certainly one of his most important. It has exercised many minds and I found Ogden's own understanding enlightening, not only in my work as a Jungian psychotherapist, but also as a parent-infant psychotherapist.
His opening paragraph caught my attention as he described the first time Winnicott presented the paper in 1968 to an American audience. He quotes the official minutes of the meeting where Winnicott is recorded to have said that his concept had been ‘torn to pieces’ and that perhaps unbelievably, given the place it has taken in the psychoanalytic oeuvre, he would be happy to give it up. Ogden writes that shortly afterwards Winnicott suffered a heart attack. Further, he was believed to have been working on the paper on the day of his death in 1971. His ideas were clearly as vital to him as they are now to us.
In reading Ogden's paper, it seemed he was grappling with something that is impossible to pin down in words. He says that ‘one must not only read it but must also participate in writing it’ (p. 1243), and goes on: ‘The ideas I develop in this paper represent my own reading and writing of Winnicott's paper - what I make of it, and more importantly, what I make with it’ (p. 1244, his italics). This statement captures not only Ogden's engagement with Winnicott's paper but also the essence of its message, namely the use the baby makes of its mother as development proceeds.
Ogden sees Winnicott's style of writing in this paper as conversational, immediate, intimate and importantly opening up questions which ‘… leaves the reader free to develop his or her own “answe