ABSTRACT
In 1967, D. W. Winnicott wrote his paper, “Mirror-role of the mother and family in child development”. Anna Freud validated Winnicott’s contribution of the idea of the “transitional object” to the world of analysts at large. Winnicott makes clear his belief that to see oneself in a mirror one must have originally been responded to by an empathically mirroring mother. Winnicott’s view vs. Melanie Klein’s view of the clinical material in “Envy and gratitude” can, therefore, be seen as a pivotal focus for an overall dialectic between Winnicott and Klein, and part of what the author refer to as the “Klein–Winnicott dialectic”. By criticising psychoanalytic technique without directly implicating Klein, Winnicott begins to support clinical technique. In the psychoanalytic world, in which technique had been little formulated since Freud, Winnicott brought new observational insight to psychoanalytic technique. Melanie Klein seems to have served as a negative model for Winnicott’s metaphor of the “too omnipotent” mother or analyst.
