ABSTRACT
Donald Winnicott, early in his career as a paediatrician and analyst, considered the being of the patient in analysis to be important. This chapter discusses Winnicott’s particular emphasis on being, expressed in his writings of the mid-1960s, at which time Wilfred Bion was developing his ideas in a similar direction but with a different emphasis. It deals with a beautiful clinically based description by Michael Parsons concerning the value of considering the ‘states of being’ of the human being as distinct from what psychoanalysts normally think of as ‘states of mind’. Winnicott realised that to include ontology within psychoanalysis was to take a risk of being misunderstood by his colleagues. Both Bion and Winnicott found their inspiration for many of their ideas from Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic formulations, in which, as psychoanalysts saw earlier, anxiety and its early management by the mother is the foundation for the inception of communication and thinking.
