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Winnicott: Early Libido and the Deep Sexual. By , pp. 3-16.
In this paper, Scarfone expands on the concept of libido and the sexual drives using an explication of Winnicott's Freudian roots, as well as connections to Laplanche's theory of generalized seduction. The author prepares us for our journey with him by noting that it is “clear … that the concept of the drive” is at work in Winnicott's thought, but that the “real question” is how useful this is to “the way we do analysis,” which for Scarfone seems to be in part a “loosening and freeing up”—exemplified by Winnicott's “irruption of the unforeseen, of the spontaneous gesture” that can become “thinkable in the course of analytic work” (pp. 4-5).
Scarfone further orients the reader by discussing Winnicott's “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification,” which, Scarfone writes, “is so close to the thing it describes that it engages us in the form of an enactment rather than a simple theoretical account of a past experience”(p. 5).1 Scarfone notes that this is also
… the mark of a psychoanalysis that is alive: as in a true work of literature, the writing carries within itself some of the charge that provoked its composition and transmits this to the reader who, on the receiving end, must find a way to survive it. [p. 5]