ABSTRACT
I came to England to pursue my analytic training and my psychoanalytic life has unfolded in this country. My analyst, supervisors, and lecturers were all unanimous in teaching that analysis was a process based on words. Of course, as the years went by, we took on board the relevance of non-verbal material, of the personality and style of the analyst the importance of a diagnostic assessment of the patient's pathology, the elements that presumably differentiated between psychotherapy and "proper" analysis. Needless to say, opinions varied and each of us gradually developed his own brand of working with patients. However, curiously enough, "touching the patient" was usually considered one of the things that "only Dr Winnicott" did with his patients. Touching was one of the unusual things that he provided to those patients who had "regressed to dependence", and his accounts were treated with puzzlement and an implicit sense of condemnation. I am sure that it was the enormous respect and admiration that Winnicott commanded in the 80British Society that precluded overt criticism of his approach to these particular patients. Not many other analysts came forward to inform the world that they treated similar patients or resorted to such technical parameters. Margaret Little proved the exception, but then, she had been analysed by Winnicott, and this was seen as confirmation that "touching" constituted a technique that characterized the analyst's therapeutic preferences, rather than being exclusively part of a patient's conscious or unconscious needs.
