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Laura Dethiville's book is a scholarly work that provides an excellent overview of most of Winnicott's major ideas. Winnicott's creativity and brilliance are illustrated by carefully chosen quotations. This is good, of course, but what interested me the most was the inadvertent depiction of cultural differences in reading and thinking about Winnicott. The French seem to have had a very different experience in the last few decades, in comparison to my experience in the American world of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology.
In the course of leading a 15-year seminar on Winnicott at the Societe de Psychanalyse Freudienne, Dethiville found that his work has been “the object of a misunderstanding” and “not completely understood” (p. 1), its depth “largely unknown” (p. 2). By its very title, the book promises “a new approach,” and there are repeated suggestions, especially in the first half, that there is a true or correct way to understand Winnicott's ideas. I was very surprised by the thought that anybody would claim to present a “correct” interpretation of Winnicott. I think of DWW (Donald Woods Winnicott) as aiming for people to immerse themselves in his writings in states of confusion as well as surprise, emerging with highly personal ideas, never trying to get the “truth” from another person (see Ogden, 2001) On p. 71, Dethiville warns about the danger of trying to find any “true” metapsychology, but the tone of the first half of the book implies that there are ideas that could be corrected.
Dethiville tells us that her experience in France has been that, until recently, Winnicott's work has been “either politely ignored or considered banal, uninteresting and meaningless” (p. 1) except for his writing about the transitional object. His concept of false self “received the most violent criticism, which above all has led to misinterpretation” (p. 85). My own experience, however, is very different. From the 1970s to the present, I have found Winnicott's work to be wide