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Donald Winnicott developed his contribution to the psychoanalytic dialogue in the intellectual and social climate of the British Psychoanalytical Society of the 1920’s through the early 70’s. The British Society during much of this period was sharply and often bitterly divided between the ideas and personalities of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Winnicott was analyzed first by James Strachey and then by Joan Rivière, one of the early Kleinian ‘inner circle’; he was supervised by Melanie Klein in his psychoanalytic work with children. Although Winnicott’s thinking developed in a direction different from that of Klein, he never denounced Kleinian thinking as did many analysts who had been at one point open to Klein’s ideas (e.g. Glover [1945] and Schmideberg [1935]).
Winnicott was a dialectician. His thinking thrived in the medium of the intense debate between the classical Freudian and the Kleinian groups. He understood that once we feel that we have finally resolved a basic psychoanalytic issue (either in our theory or in our understanding of patients), it is at that point that our thinking has reached an impasse. Winnicott (1968) states, I think without false humility, that he offered his patients interpretations to let them know the limits of his understanding. Many of Winnicott’s most valuable clinical and theoretical contributions are in the form of paradoxes that he asks us to accept without resolving, for the truth of the paradox lies in neither of its poles, but in the space between them.