You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is a special privilege to immerse oneself in Winnicott's writings, to attune oneself to his thinking, to share in the world between inner and outer reality, between subject and object—the rich yet vaguely circumscribed world of the transitional object of imagination and
creativity—which he so well understood and so beautifully described. We owe a debt to those who made this posthumous volume available to us: Winnicott's wife, Ishak Ramzy as sympathetic editor and, last but not least, his child patient, "The Piggle," and her parents.
Those readers who approach Winnicott's work from the perspective of the rational ego are likely to consider it nonsense at best. Others, viewing it from the side of the id, are apt to complain about the superficiality or even the absence of emphasis on instinctual drives and their interpretation. Between these extremes, however, and within the uncertain confines of Winnicott's own approach, different readers may focus fruitfully on different aspects of the multifaceted psychic sphere in which Winnicott moves.
My own inclination at present is to focus on Winnicott's role in assisting a mother and her little girl at a stressful point in their individual growth and mutual relationship. The mother noted with alarm that her beloved firstborn, nicknamed "The Piggle," suffered a change of personality following the birth of a sister when she was twenty-one months of age. In a spurt of precocious defensive ego and superego development the little girl distanced herself unduly from her impulses and feelings and could no longer integrate them within herself or vis-à-vis her environment. Her inner disharmony found expression in listless boredom and withdrawal, in exaggerated reaction-formations, in frightening fantasies which preoccupied her during the day and interfered with her sleep at night. Plagued by early guilt and loss of self-love, she refused to act like "herself"; she isolated her breakthroughs of destructiveness and found no co