ABSTRACT
In Playing and Reality, Donald W. Winnicott's meditation on psychoanalysis and the human being at the end of his life, this question appears implicitly: when he returned to "Transitional objects and transitional phenomena", some changes occurred between the 1951 and the 1975 versions. Winnicott's objection to the death drive is well known, considering it as a religious scoria and an avatar of original sin. Winnicott also describes the emergence of a perversity when the child pretends to have hanged himself in order to terrify his parents. The string that represented the bond therefore mimics suicide. Winnicott himself recognises that "This case therefore is of special interest if it makes possible the observation of the development of a perversion". While Winnicott is inflexible with regard to the secondary benefits, he nevertheless seems to be clearly committed to the accompaniment in regression as a therapeutic hope and he refuses to shatter the protective illusion.
