Memories of Donald Winnicott

Barbara Dockar-Drysdale, founder and original therapeutic adviser to the Mulberry Bush School, is now in her eighties, and living in retirement. Her writings make frequent reference to her indebtedness to Winnicott, whom she used to meet monthly over the last seventeen years of his life to discuss their ideas and work. Winnicott wrote of her: ‘Here was someone who knew’.     

Infantile sexuality: Its place in the conceptual developments of Anna Freud and Donald W. Winnicott

This essay explores the place of infantile sexuality in the theories of Anna Freud and Donald W Winnicott. Both Anna Freud and D.W. Winnicott incorporated and at the same time changed the classical psychoanalytic account of infantile sexuality and the instinctual drives. Whilst Anna Freud remained closer to her father's original conceptualization, she developed a multidimensional model of development which gave the drives a foundational status whist also maintaining their significance in giving meaning and texture to children's subjective experience. Winnicott also retained much of S. Freud's original theorizing except that in a fundamental way he turned it on its head when considering earliest development. For him the establishment of the self was paramount, and the drives and infantile sexuality merely served to give substance to that self.     

D. W. Winnicott,transitional objects and the creation of the divine

Religious expressions and religious behaviours are often considered to be mainly mental or spiritual phenomena, to a large degree divorced from or threatened by physical or material forms that may accompany their expression. This paper asks whether the diminution of the material or the condemnation of idols, icons and religious art loses sight of possible benefits that involvement with these forms of material divinity has for believers. Using the concept of transitional objects and transitional phenomena developed by D. W. Winnicott, a mid-twentieth-century psychoanalyst, I argue that idols, icons and religious art often represent transitional objects that form psychological bridges, intermediaries or anticipated “transitions” from humans to unseen divinities who require materialisation in some form to be maintained actively in the believer’s mind. In the process of creating or designing these material forms, the forms themselves often come to be considered “divine”. Illustrations are provided.     

Winnicott's dream: some reflections on D. W. Winnicott and C. G. Jung

The author discusses D. W. Winnicott's 1964 review of C. G. Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, emphasizing the psychological effect the reviewing process had on Winnicott himself. Writing the review constellated Winnicott's unconscious, and he reported having a healing dream 'for Jung and for some of my patients, as well as for myself'. Winnicott's 'countertransference' to Jung helped him personally, and the review was Winnicott's first written formulation of his theory on 'The use of an object'.     

A measure of agreement: an exploration of the relationship of D. W. Winnicott and Phyllis Greenacre

The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott and the American psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre were both deeply absorbed by the vicissitudes of the infant's and young child's psychic development. Their clinical observations and theoretical ideas display striking convergences and reciprocal influences. Winnicott was deeply influenced by Greenacre's account of maturational processes, an important stimulus to his thinking that originated outside of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Greenacre's writings on early ego development and creativity were influenced by Winnicott's concept of transitional phenomena. The fact that these relationships have remained unexplored until now indicates the need for less insular accounts of the development of psychoanalytic thought on the two sides of the Atlantic.     

From Enemy Combatant to Strange Bedfellow The Role of Religious Narratives in the Work of W. R. D. Fairbairn and D. W. Winnicott

Psychoanalysis has a well-documented history of antipathy toward religion. As a consequence of the postmodern shift in philosophy, however, there are those who, albeit cautiously, are attempting to approach religion with a renewed spirit of dialogue and inquiry as a narrative among many narratives that has informed and even enriched the development of psychoanalysis.

In this spirit of dialogue, the author traces the influence of early religious affiliations on two object relations theorists, W. R. D. Fairbairn and D. W. Winnicott. Fairbairn's early imbibing of Calvinist theology in Scotland and Winnicott's involvement in the Wesleyan church are detailed. The theological differences between these Protestant perspectives (which form counterpoints to one another) are clarified and the perspectives are positioned within the framework of British culture. These religious themes are then identified within the works of Fairbairn and Winnicott.

As a final consideration, the relational nature of the Judeo-Christian God, and the subsequent view of human life that flows from that theology, are posited as influential in the development of the relational shift in psychoanalysis. The author details the association between this shift and the seminal work of Fairbairn and Winnicott.     

Jung,Winnicott and the divided psyche

In his review of Memories Dreams Reflections, Winnicott diagnosed Jung as suffering from a psychic split, and characterized the content and the structure of analytical psychology as primarily moulded and conditioned by Jung's own defensive quest for a ‘self that he could call his own’. This pathologizing analysis continues to be endorsed by contemporary Jungian writers. In this paper I attempt to show that Winnicott's critique is fundamentally misguided because it derives from a psychoanalytic model of the psyche, a model that regards all dissociation as necessarily pathological. I argue that Jung's understanding of the psyche differs radically from this model, and further, that it conforms by and large to the kind of dissociative model that we find in the writings of Frederic Myers, William James and Theodor Flournoy. I conclude that a fruitful relationship between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology must depend upon an awareness of these important differences between the two psychic models.