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Donald Winnicott's contributions to psychoanalysis have been both decisive and immense. It is an index of his wisdom and astuteness that he was capable of observing what nearly everyone knows and radicalizing the otherwise mundane in ways that create a rupture in a tradition. In the field of psychoanalysis, the rupture he created was the site for new traditions.
Accordingly, James Grotstein, a noted psychoanalytic thinker, writes the following in the introduction to Margaret Little's Psychotic Anxieties and Containment: A Personal Record of an Analysis with Winnicott:
Long known largely for his concept of transitional objects, the holding environment, and primary maternal preoccupation, the analytic world has awakened slowly but surely to the fact that he [Winnicott] was a sophisticated and sentient metapsychologist whose contributions have plumbed the ontological depths of our existence, have “transitionalized” psychoanalytic perspective from the single subject to the individuality of the dyad, have introduced the “third dimension” of dialectics, irony, and paradox into a psychoanalytic theoretical structure that did not know that it was still trapped in the “first dimension” of “either/or,” aspects of countertransference. (p. 7)
True to Grotstein's description of Winnicott's contribution to the psychoanalytic perspective that includes dialectics, paradox and irony, I am struck by the countless number of Winnicott's contributions that can both stand as independent concepts and be complementary to existing ones. For example, Winnicott's (1965) view of psychosis as an “environmental deficiency disease” (p. 135) which Grotstein cites, is by itself not remarkable, but add Winnicott's concepts of “privation, deprivation, and impingement” (p. 7) and you have greater fine tuning of introjective processes. In his introduction to Little's book, Grotstein says precisely what Winnicott's contribution adds to, fine tunes, or