ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on Winnicott's clinical practice and the theorizing associated with it. The author suggests that, rather than Winnicott's practice being influenced by his study of infant development, it was his psychoanalytic work with adults that enabled him to understand early development. The concept of ‘transitional space’ was created as a way of locating objects that had not yet been identified in the theory of Winnicott's time. Crucial to this concept is the view of psychoanalysis as a relationship in which the participants affect each other reciprocally: this enables engagement with the patient to involve authentic feelings, including hate. The ideas of ‘holding’ and ‘staying with’ the patient show how Winnicott's participation in the analytic relationship is more bodily than Bion's concept of the analyst as a psychic ‘container’.
Winnicott's approach allows the analysis to involve two kinds of relationship simultaneously and the analyst to be two different things for the patient: the object of the transference (equivalent to the object-mother) and the functor of the analytic ecology (equivalent to the environment-mother). The transference presupposes at least one previous experience of an object relationship but some patients have never experienced this. These patients tend to withdraw before they can make the more ‘profitable’ move of regression. In these contexts, verbal communications are of limited value. The analyst's bodily presence and the use of interpretation to demonstrate the limits of his understanding allow the analysis to survive periods of withdrawal. The limits of interpretation respect the fact that even (especially) psychic health depends on an incommunicable, inaccessible core. This is what it means to be, and to be recognized as, an individual.
