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I have not met another analyst [i.e., besides Winnicott] who was more inevitably himself. It was this quality of his inviolable me-ness that enabled him to be so many different persons to such diverse people. Each of us who has encountered him has his own Winnicott, and he never transgressed the other's invention of him by any assertion of his own style of being. And yet he always stayed so inexorably Winnicott.
In the above quote, Masud Khan captures the living paradox that was Winnicott himself: his ability to be made use of by the other for personal growth while maintaining his “inviolable me-ness.” Theoreticians of various orientations have likewise “invented” Winnicott, elaborating on his thinking by making their own creative use of him. Yet Winnicott refused allegiance to any given school of psychoanalysis, insisting on his creative independence. It was the desire to explore this dialectic of Winnicott's unassailable “me-ness” and others' creative use of him that led me to convene this roundtable.
My motivation did not stem from intellectual interest alone; personal reasons were also a strong factor. My initial reading of Winnicott led to the experience of feeling found and recognized by another. His ineffable prose articulated the as yet unknown aspects of my psychic life. What had been ungraspable, on the periphery of awareness, took form. I might say, as with reading great novels or poetry, that Winnicott “created” experience for me.
In the literary critic Harold Bloom's sense, I “misread” Winnicott; there is no strict reading of Winnicott, no pinning him down to orthodox doctrine or technique. I, like others, read and appreciate Winnicott in relation to his