ABSTRACT
Dr. Epstein offers startling new insights into the work of Donald W. Winnicott, MD, a leading and highly influential British psychoanalyst. He shows that Winnicott, while still Freudian in his orientation, was engaged in a quiet revolution against the Freudian orthodoxy of his time. He spells out Winnicott's heretofore unrecognized affinity with Buddhism. His description of the seashore where children play is the transition from the sea to the earth, with all that that symbolizes. He articulately reviews Sigmund Freud's inability to experience Romain Rolland's "oceanic experience" for himself and compares Freud's pondering the relationship between the ego and the unconscious with the Buddha's exploration of the borders of the self and not-self. Clinging, grasping, possessing, holding on are concepts which apply both to Buddhism and to mothering. Thus, clinging, in all its forms, refers to attachment and Buddhism teaches people to unlearn literal and symbolic clinging.
