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Going beyond Winnicott's widely known ideas about creativity, in this paper the authors ask why some people are able to live creatively while others suffer recurrent feelings of anger, futility, and depression. Examining Winnicott's reframing of aggression as a life force, it attempts to answer this question by tracing the evolution of his thinking on the nature and origin of aggression. It argues that because he saw aggression as inherent and as central to emotional development, interference in its expression compromises psychic maturation. The paper explores how Winnicott arrived at the conception of a combined love-strife drive and demonstrates that for him, there is no love without aggression, no subject, no object, no reality, and no creativity. That is, for Winnicott, aggression is an achievement that leads to the capacity to live creatively and to experience authenticity. Clinical vignettes illustrate the
The authors are the members of the Montreal Winnicott Study Group. Beatrice Melmed Posner is a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, psychoanalyst in private practice, teacher and supervisor at the Argyle Institute for Human Relations; Roslyn Wolfe Glickman is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, psychiatric social worker, Montreal Children's Hospital; Eithne Coyle Taylor is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice and at the Infant/Parent Program, Douglas Hospital, Montreal; Joyce Canfield is an adult and child psychoanalyst, child psychiatrist, Montreal Children's Hospital, past president of the Quebec English branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society; Francine Cyr is a child psychoanalytic psychotherapist, professor of clinical psychology, Université de Montréal.
therapeutic use of these conclusions and their value for psychoanalytic theory.