ABSTRACT
The essentials of D. W. Winnicott may be found in Human Nature, a book he never succeeded in finishing but which can still be treasured for its very inspiring richness. In “The Posthumous Winnicott”, a lecture given in 1991 at the Squiggle Foundation, the author emphasizes the distinctions between psyche, soul, mind, and intellect, which can only be found in Winnicott’s work. The emphasis on emotional development is common to all the psychoanalysts of the British Society, but in Winnicott it takes the form of a sort of incarnation, the result of the dwelling of the psyche in the body, where the psyche is an intermediate structure between the organism and the environment. One unnoticed point of agreement between Sigmund Freud and Winnicott concerns the centrality of the dream. Freud’s the Outline of Psychoanalysis puts the interpretation of dreams at the core of the analytic discovery and the practice of analysis.
