ABSTRACT
D. W. Winnicott was one of the first to suggest deeper and better reasons for challenging Freud's theory. In an idiosyncratic review of Jung's autobiography, Winnicott advises one might all profit not by taking sides with either Freud or Jung, but by allowing "the two to meet and to go together and to separate". Approaching Jung with admirable empathy, he concludes that Jung parted with Freud because Freud's theory had little to offer him in terms of his own illness. Having built up a complex defense organization in recovering from childhood schizophrenia, Jung could not have been helped by Freud because Freud's model of repressed unconscious was insufficient to account for Jung's dissociatively split mind. So Jung sought his own self-cure, and the theory he eventually articulated was an expression of his search for both self and cure. "Playing" was also shorthand for Winnicott's view of therapy as a proto-symbolic, performative activity rather than one trafficking in information exchange and insight.
