ABSTRACT
A sense of infantile potency permeates D. W. Winnicott’s writings, intimating human abilities and possibilities in the course of a troubled existence. At a heart clinic, in the early days of his career, he began to note the response of children to situations of anxiety: “an anxious child, during a physical examination in a heart clinic or the heart may be racing away”. Critics of Winnicott, by comparison, have sometimes been led to assume that he “blames” the parents and ignores internal conflict. Winnicott and Melanie Klein certainly disagreed on a number of crucial issues, and yet it is also widely understood that they had important affinities, some of which resulted from historical factors that led to mutual influences. In Winnicott’s thinking, a psychosomatic closeness to the mother begins to give the infant a sense of solidity and a rudimentary self-awareness, helping the process of “personalization”.
