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Psychoanalysis in its first century has had several great thinkers, but, to my mind, only one great English-speaking writer: Donald Winnicott. Because style and content are so interdependent in his writing, his papers are not well served by a thematic reading aimed exclusively at gleaning what the paper is “about.” Such efforts often result in trivial aphorisms. Winnicott, for the most part, does not use language to arrive at conclusions; rather, he uses language to create experiences in reading which are inseparable from the ideas he is presenting – or, more accurately, the ideas he is playing with.
I offer here a reading of Winnicott’s (1945) “Primitive emotional development,” a paper that contains the seeds of virtually all the major contributions to psychoanalysis that Winnicott would make over the course of the succeeding 26 years of his life. I hope to demonstrate the interdependence of the life of the ideas being developed and the life of the writing in this seminal contribution to the analytic literature. What Winnicott’s paper has to offer to an analytic reader could not be said in any other way (which is to say that the writing is extraordinarily resistant to paraphrase). It has been my experience that an awareness of the way the language is working significantly enhances what can be learned from reading Winnicott.
In recent years, I have found that the only way I can do justice to studying and teaching Winnicott is to read his papers aloud, line by line, as I would a poem, exploring what the language is doing in addition to what it is saying. It is not an overstatement to say that a great many passages from Winnicott’s papers well deserve to be called prose poems. These passages meet Tom Stoppard’s (1999) definition
of poetry as “the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning” (p. 10).
In my discussion of Winnicott’s paper, I will not be limiting myself to an explication of the text, although many of the ideas developed there will be dis