ABSTRACT
The contract was like an emotional spell cast over the relationship at the beginning to exempt her from contingency, to pre-empt the inevitable uncertainties of evolving time. Freudian interpretation aims to extend the realm of intention, and diminish the empire of contingency. If the instincts feel to the infant like contingent events, then the mother's task, in the Winnicottian picture, is the personalising or humanising of an original and formative contingency. Accidents become disowned intentions; other voices speak through our mistakes. So the idea of accident—of the apparently unintended, the contingent—gives us access to otherwise unavailable desires or parts of the self, depending on one's language commitments. The contingent self "knows" nothing in the conventional sense; but this is not a deficit but a definition, because in the conventional sense, there is nothing for it to know.
