ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the material relating to "the use of an object," a concept developed by D. W. Winnicott towards the end of his life. It focuses on some of the notes that Winnicott made in 1965 in the train on his way home from Dartington Hall, where he had been thinking and talking about the subject of freedom and control in progressive schools. The chapter concerns the unfinished and also virtually unedited paper "The Use of an Object in the Context of Moses and Monotheism," which was written in January 1969. The analyst feels like interpreting, but this can spoil the process, and for the patient can seem like a kind of self-defence, the analyst parrying the patient's attack. The chapter discusses that rewriting of the theory of the roots of aggression, since most of that which has already been written by analysts has been formulated without reference.
