Thinking about Winnicott and the Origins of the Self

The war must have been the background, in a reactive way, for many of Winnicott's insights, in that he became interested in the child patient and the infant, and that he later decided he must study psychosis by means of analysis. ‘This happened in the war, and I might say that I hardly noticed the Blitz, being all the time engaged in the analysis of psychotic patients, who are notoriously oblivious of bombs, earthquakes and floods’ (Winnicott, in Rodman 2003, p. 4).

Soon Winnicott's need to be himself grew strong: to be ‘different’, to discover his own sense of being rather than imitating others. In addition, he had an unusual talent for the arts—not just one art—and a desire not to be ignored for the rest of his life. Thus one can understand the determined attitude with which he introduced new concepts and discoveries, in the milieu of the London Psychoanalytic Institute which was not hospitable to his views on primitive emotional development (Winnicott 1945). His many clinical observations, which he called ‘research analysis’, were entirely original and outside all traditions. He did not want to read too much Ferenczi, whom he felt close to, because he wanted to think with his own mind. His ‘research analysis’ also included the questions of the ‘true and the false self, ‘regression to dependence’, and the gender role (female-male = being-doing). He suggested that there was ‘no point in preventing suicides at all costs’, and finally, apropos the antisocial tendencies he discovered during his work with evacuated children, that it was ‘better to let them be in their own family than to evacuate them at a very young age’. His other ‘personal views’ were always based on large clinical experience, out of which he could make a theory, expressed in a graphic sign (the squiggle), or in