Discussion of D. W. Winnicott's Article, Split-off Male and Female Elements Found Clinically in Men and Women: Theoretical Inferences

Although Winnicott has presented his hypothesis at the end of his paper as a progression from the fragment of a psychoanalytic session presented at the beginning, I find it more useful to deal with the two separately: (1) the nature of encapsulated secondary personalities, whether of the same or opposite sex, and (2) the nature of those primary kinesthetic messages which mothers convey to their infants.

I found the whole paper so stimulating that I embarked on a series of discussions with colleagues and I will draw upon their comments in the course of discussing Winnicott's first point. The first question that it evoked was the query: Are dual personalities ever of opposite sex? The encapsulated female in Winnicott's patient could have been the nucleus of a dual personality. I explored this question with Milton Erickson who has done extensive clinical and experimental work with dual personalities. Dr. Erickson does not believe that the particular patient whom Dr. Winnicott described was a secondary personality, but rather a case of insecurity in self-identification. But the case, and my questions, evoked from him the statement, “I do not think a dual personality can be one where a feminine personality and a male personality exist,” although he reported having seen cases where one personality was heterosexual and the other homosexual, with many implications.

I have seen dual personalities in which the dominant personality was definitely homosexual while the secondary personality was extremely heterosexual. Sometimes, because of the intensity of the secondary personality's heterosexuality, the dominant personality had withdrawn and let the secondary personality come to the foreground, marry, and have children. Now and then the homosexual personality took over briefly and “kicked that strange man out of my bed,” laid claim to all the furniture, and moved to another part of the city and then went into hiding, leaving the secondary personality in the foreground confronted