Making Use of Winnicott: A Roundtable Discussion with

SHEILA RONSEN: Hello. I'm Sheila Ronsen, the Associate Director of Continuing Education at NIP-TI and the moderator of this roundtable. I want to welcome all of you here today. Let me introduce our roundtable presenters. Dr. Fayek Nakhla is a psychiatrist and a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and is on the faculty of the Object Relations Institute in New York City. Professor Elsa First is a child and adult psychoanalyst and a supervisor and faculty member at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Dr. Judith Kuspit is a psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center in New York City and Dr. Murray Schwartz is a Professor of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College.

I would like to begin by setting a sense of space, which was an integral part of my original conception of this roundtable. I saw it as a playing space. Paraphrasing Winnicott, I use the verb “playing” rather than the noun “play” to give a notion of things in process, active and becoming versus finite and foreclosed; a place where Winnicott's ideas could be presented and made use of by all of us under the sway of our own personal idiom, as Christopher Bollas might say. Each presenter has created and found in Winnicott's work something of meaning, something that led to a passionate and enduring engagement which they will be sharing with us today. I hope that this day affords us all some surprises, an occasion for discovering what was already there to be found. We'll first hear from Fayek Nakhla.