ABSTRACT
This paper was written in 1977 when I was asked to contribute to an issue of the French journal L’Arc which was to be devoted entirely to papers about Winnicott.1
In this paper I have decided to limit myself to certain ideas of D.W. Winnicott’s that seem to have been most fertilizing for my own thinking. To do this I will take as my starting-point a reference of his to the drawing of the two jugs that I made in the 1930s. I have also chosen this drawing because it foreshadowed, for me, the image of overlapping circles made many years later by my patient, Susan, an image which had, still later, become a kind of flag or model for my own thinking about my work with patients and with myself.
