Prologue: Winnicott's Legacy

In a book review on Winnicott, Emanuel Berman (1996) wrote that, some time ago, he was asked who is the most influential theoretician in the psychoanalytic community of his country, Israel. It occurred to him that a simple way of finding out would be to check the references in the case studies submitted by all graduates of the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute. To his surprise, he found that Winnicott was quoted more than any other psychoanalyst, including Freud. Berman suspected that this was also probably true in other countries. He found it intriguing, because Winnicott was neither a psychologist nor psychiatrist. He was a pediatrician. His writings were not ensconced in one particular analytic theory and he was a marginal figure in psychoanalysis until late in his career.

Elaborating on Berman's response, all of Winnicott's writing conveys the centrality of development. Goldman (1993) referred to how Winnicott repeatedly conveyed that development must be in the bones of an analyst. This is a fundamental truth about analysis that Winnicott was able to capture. If psychoanalysis is anything, it is a system that promotes bringing parts into the whole of the Self or Personhood. It is the epigenetic basis of human life.

Winnicott's model of development begins with the infant and mother together enabling the infant to develop by creating transitional spaces and objects; metaphors and symbols; and the capacity to deal with the loneliness in being human and maintain an authenticity of self. Winnicott emphasized that increasing authenticity and feeling alive in the clinical situation is an overriding need and a source of human happiness. In his writing, he repeatedly conveyed the belief that theory, although important, is overused, creating hazards in the analytic relationship of the domination of a theory and the personalities identified with that theory interfering with creativity, authenticity and feeling alive.

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