ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the different notions of disruption and destructiveness informing British psychoanalytic accounts of creativity and the mind, and links them to modernist concerns the decomposition of established modes of representation. It describes the insights to be gained in looking at records of Donald Winnicott in the consulting room and at his clinical acumen. The book considers his attempt to develop an idea of difference, based on sexual difference and its manifestation in the transference, less convincing than his discussion of the growth of the self through the encounter with an other elaborated through a distinction between being and doing. It discusses a complementarity between another theorist and Winnicott, while also emphasizing specific differences in their theoretical accounts that argue for differently inflected approaches to some common fundamentals.