ABSTRACT
D. W. Winnicott's work represents a major advance in the development of the psychoanalytic conception of the subject. The implicit dialectics of Sigmund Freud and S. Klein became the foundation of Winnicott's effort to conceptualize in analytic terms the experience of being alive as a subject. Winnicott captures something of the experience of the paradoxical simultaneity of at-one-ment and separateness. Winnicott states that what the mother looks like to the infant "is related to," not the same as, what the mother sees in the infant. Perhaps the most important of Winnicott's contributions to the psychoanalytic conceptualization of the subject is his concept of transitional object relatedness. The forms of mother-infant relatedness that have been described all reflect a central theme that underlies the Winnicottian conception of the creation of the subject: the subjectivity of the infant takes shape in the potential space between mother and infant.
