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It can be claimed of few psychoanalysts that they lastingly changed the scale and contours of the discipline. Especially today, when competing and often incompatible theories of the fundamental features of psychic life inform the intellectual life of psychoanalytic groups, few individuals have possessed the imaginative power to override the divisions and schisms that mark psychoanalytic history. Freud, of course, always will serve as the starting point for mapping the psychoanalytic domain, yet his ideas about instinctual life, often reduced to a stale debate about “drive theory,” have certainly outlived their usefulness. Even such centers of intellectual gravity as Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan frequently have become more the locus of group loyalties than sources of new, resonant ideas that can enliven contemporary psychoanalytic discourse. The psychoanalytic field seems at once more open to conflict, more pluralistic, and more threatened with incoherence than ever before. A great effort at what Keats called “negative capability,” the ability to remain in doubt, seems called for if one is to participate productively in the multifarious debates informing the field as a whole.
Why, then, is this an appropriate moment to add to the celebration of the work of D. W. Winnicott? Precisely, I would say, because, more than any other psychoanalyst of his time, Winnicott helped to keep the field of psychoanalysis open to creative exploration of its perennial concerns: the play of unconscious ideas in the experience of being alive; the nature of psychosomatic unity and the kinds of experience that disrupt or prevent the sense of continuous aliveness; the conceptualization of the earliest mental states; the paradoxical features of the self and its relation to the world of objects and others. Though psychoanalytic vocabularies have changed in many ways