Introduction

I am asking for a kind of revolution in our work. Let us re-examine what we do.

The principal aim of this volume is to demonstrate that Winnicott’s contribution constitutes a major revolution in psychoanalysis.2 A sense of self rooted in the newborn’s primary relationship is at the heart of his theoretical matrix.3 Subjectivity, therefore, is inscribed with the m/Other – the primacy of the ‘environment-individual set-up’ (1958).

Close examination of his theoretical advances reveal that the foundations reside firmly with Sigmund Freud. For Winnicott, psychoanalysis is a theory of emotional development and human nature which can only be examined through the lens of Freud’s scientific clinical methodology with its therapeutic aims (1945).

Winnicott’s formulations on early psychic development – ‘creating the object’ and the ‘essential paradox of the conception-perception gap’ – are inextricably linked with an articulation of the transference-counter transference matrix. This forges an expansion of the analytic setting and creates fertile ground for the recognition of the ‘analyzing situation’,4 in which the analyst and analysand engage in ‘co-thinking’ and ‘co-creativity’5 in the context of the après coup.6

Winnicott’s psychoanalytic clinical investigations led to his view that aggression is a benign force in the newborn infant. These formulations extend Freud’s concept of hilflosigkeit through a concept that recognizes different stages of dependency in the infant related to the early holding

environment (1965d).7 While Winnicott’s final theory on aggression – the survival of the object – links with the concept of helplessness as well as the idea of a self-preservative instinct, at the same time it constitutes a divergence from Freud’s late tentative concept of the death instinct.8 The outcome of these new psychoanalytic extensions on Freud’s work, as seen across the whole of Winnicott’s work, results in a distinctive psychoanalytic approa