You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud never ceased being impressed by the plasticity of psychic life and the reversibility of states. When he gives a reason for not abandoning hope in the treatment of psychosis, he points to the vast changes we go through on a daily basis, as we pass from ordinary consciousness to the madness of dreams and back again. What most moves us today in Freud are his descriptions of one thing changing into another. His complementary emphasis on fixity and structure acts like brakes for incessant movement described as liquid and electrical.
Winnicott takes up Freud's emphasis on movement and comes down on the side of movement over structure. He is one of a handful of psychoanalysts who wants his terms to be alive and fresh and suggestive of movement. He insists on this: “The word intermediate is certainly useful but the word transition implies movement and I must not lose sight of it otherwise we shall find some sort of static phenomenon being given an association with my name” (cited in Rodman, 1987, p. 42).
Winnicott's terms relate to freedom: transitional experiencing, use of object, use of madness, unintegration, the incommunicado core (Eigen, 1991b). They depict different aspects of feeling fresh and free, new and alive, linked with a sense of creativeness. For Winnicott (like Freud), the sense of creativeness makes life worth living (Eigen, 1983). Out of this sense arises the prayer Winnicott was to use at the beginning of his autobiography: “Lord, may I be alive when I die.”
Above, I wrote that Winnicott affirms movement over structure, yet how can these be separated? Perhaps this is possible only conceptually or as a matter of faith. For Winnicott, there is a kind of formless moment that is the homebase of the self. Bollas (1989)