ABSTRACT

This chapter explores Winnicott’s use of the term “ruthlessness,” which he uses in two different ways. On the one hand, it signals absence of concern, which developmentally has not yet made its appearance. This use of the term might best be translated as zest, wholeheartedness or vigour. Winnicott talks also of something more than careless zest; aggression is also at play, and will remain so, even after the establishment of concern. Ruthlessness has an ongoing role to play in the cycles of destruction and survival of internal objects, but this process is mediated by the object becoming established, through surviving internal attack, as outside of omnipotent control, and therefore a steady resource to be put to use in mediating the storms of the internal world. The chapter also explores a form of ruthlessness that is defensive and has a quality quite different to vigour or zest or wholehearted surrender. This involves a ruthless determination to maintain omnipotent control, and in doing so to maintain an internal world that resists surrender to object usage. Failure to move through cycles of ruthless destruction into concern for the object is sometimes temporary and sometimes enduring, and carried into cycles of deadness, compliance, dissociation or attack. Ruthless pursuit of survival is common to both preservation of the original failure and subsequent thinness of concern, but also, in the right context, a reach for a new beginning. Varieties of defensive ruthlessness in psychoanalytic psychotherapies are illustrated with case material.