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One of the most interesting periods in the history of psychoanalysis in France was undoubtedly the time in the mid-1960s when the influence of D. W. Winnicott – the man as well as his work – was at its height. It was all the more surprising since the psychoanalytic world, at that time, was in a turmoil because of the very sharp doctrinal controversies and splits among the different institutions. Winnicott was immediately acknowledged and adopted by all those groups, those who remained faithful to Lacan’s teaching as well as those who kept their distance or even moved on to other ideas.
In an issue published in 1977 of the literary review L’Arc containing articles from psychoanalysts from very different horizons, one of the contributors, O. Mannoni, a follower of Lacan, wrote, ‘To analytic circles as such, what Winnicott brought more than anything else was freedom; it was only to be expected that that freedom led him to push back the limits of those circles and even to go beyond them.’
It would of course be interesting to examine in detail what each person found particularly refreshing in his or her theoretical and practical work; what was shared by all, however, was the feeling of freedom, its impact on the principles of psychoanalytic treatment, and Winnicott’s focus on clinical empiricism and the value of creativity.
Thus set free, in the midst of theoretical deviations and the search for the ‘real’ Freud, from the burden of doubt and anathema, the French found in Winnicott a concrete developmental model that was simple and evocative, one whose reference was the individual, one
which acknowledged the importance of the relationship dimension – there was truly something refreshing about all of this.
That message about freedom and creativity, the anti-conformism that became a way of thinking, could be seen not only in all of Winnicott’s writings as they were diligently translated in the 1960s and 1970s, but also in encounters with the man himself and the unforget-tabl