ABSTRACT

Clare Winnicott tells us that her husband, Donald W. Winnicott, was invited in 1936 by Susannah Isaacs to lecture to teachers and professors. Reading Human Nature, one is struck by the importance of psychosomatics in Wirinicott's work. He deals with it at length in the first part and ends the book with a chapter entitled "Psychosomatic Disorder Reconsidered". This indicates that emotional development as a paradigm implies a preliminary postulate: emotions that play an essential part of the human psyche are rooted in the body. There is a close relationship between fantasy and the conception of the transitional object. Fantasy and the transitional object result from imaginative elaboration as a human characteristic. Since Winnicott, "illusion" is no longer a pejorative term—a fallacy that should not exist. There is something extremely suggestive in Winnicott's theorization about the intermediary stage between primary narcissism and object relationships.