ABSTRACT
Our chapter is particularly focused on technical issues, not because we are only interested in technical issues in Winnicott—and we love Winnicott in a thorough-going way—but because he speaks to our hearts. We understand what he says differently from all the other authors. But we think that in the technical realm, Winnicott introduced revolutionary ideas without making too much propaganda about his revolution. His revolution is a quiet revolution but that makes a difference particularly in comparison to Melanie Klein’s technique which at the time was very, very prevailing in the British Psychoanalytical Society. Just a note on the date, Melanie Klein (1946) wrote the first summary of her conclusion of the decade preceding in the famous paper, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” in which she introduced fundamentally the concept of projective identification. It is very interesting that Winnicott, who at the time was interested in becoming, in being considered a Kleinian, produced in 1947 a paper like “Hate in the 32Countertransference”, which is completely different from the ideas of Melanie Klein that he wanted to be part of. And the word “hate” is the first time in which a sentiment, a feeling, appeared in the psychoanalytical literature. So it’s very provocative that such a sentiment burst out of the blue in the literature. There is a question: i.e., if Winnicott was aware of this, was he intentional in doing this or was he only being provocative.
