ABSTRACT
Unlike Freud, Donald Winnicott is not a cultural icon, read in Great Books courses, revered and reviled.1 Unlike Jacques Lacan, he is not an intellectual cult figure, with a band of zealous disciples and an impenetrable jargon. There is no school of Winnicott, there are no courses in his methods. All this is as he wished it. Nobody was more skeptical of cults and the rigidity they induced. All his life he was obsessed with the freedom of the individual self to exist defiantly, resisting parental and cultural demands, to be there without saying a word if silence was its choice. In his own writings he spoke with a voice that was determinedly his own, surprisingly personal, idiosyncratic, playful and at the same time ordinary. One could not extract a jargon from it if one tried, and one cannot talk about his theoretical ideas without confronting live complex human beings. That, perhaps, is why he has never had a secure home in the academy, so enamored of beautiful scientific or pseudo-scientific structures, so fearful, often, of real people and the demands their complexity imposes. At the same time, for these same reasons he has had an enormous influence on the practice of psychoanalysis, particularly in America.
