ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of D. W. Winnicott's "Primitive Emotional Development": a paper containing the seeds of virtually every major contribution to psychoanalysis that he would make over the course of the succeeding twenty-six years of his life. It demonstrates the interdependence of the life of the ideas being developed and the life of the writing in this seminal contribution to the analytic literature. Winnicott's inimitable voice can be heard almost immediately in "Primitive Emotional Development" as he explains his "methodology". The chapter also demonstrates how the life of the writing is critical to, and inseparable from, the life of the ideas. Winnicott briefly discusses several aspects of the analytic relationship, with particular emphasis on the transference-countertransference. He believes that this body of experience is a major source of his conception of primitive emotional development. Winnicott then provides the reader with a major revision of analytic technique.
