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The main purpose of this paper is to present a unified view on Winnicott’s contribution to psychoanalysis. Although Winnicott is presently recognized as one of the great figures in the history of psychoanalysis it is evident that a systematic philological, historical and conceptual study of his writings is rare, in spite of some notable exceptions (see Abram 2007, 2008; ; Ogden 1986; Phillips 1988). Moreover, we are still waiting for the publication of Winnicott´s Collected Works,2 and generally speaking, Winnicott research can hardly be compared with current Freudian scholarship. This situation is changing, particularly in Latin America, where Winnicott has become the most quoted psychoanalytic author after Freud (cf. Abadi and Outeiral 1997). Unfortunately, citation does not necessarily mean that the work is truly studied and understood.
My emphasis in this paper is on the nature of Winnicott’s contribution rather than a focus on one or another of his many contributions to psychoanalysis. I aim to achieve this by conceptual analysis largely based on a study of the historical development of Winnicott’s ideas. Winnicott himself recommended a historical approach to the understanding of his views on emotional development. In his posthumously published book Human Nature, after explaining some of his ideas on the imaginative elaboration of body functioning, he added:
The reader must form a personal opinion of these matters, after learning what is thought as far as possible in the historical manner,
Page 113which is the only way that the theory of any one moment [in personal development] becomes intelligible and interesting.
Here I suggest that ‘interesting’ means both personally appealing and theoretically important. Clearly this applies to any attempt to understand other parts of Winnicott’s theory and indeed psychoanalysis in general:
Readers of analytic literature may easily become impatient if they take some statement of analytic theory and treat it as