ABSTRACT
In this short but important paper, Winncott gives us, after more than 30 years of practice, some of his most seasoned conclusions regarding what he has come to see as the aims of psychodynamic therapy. He writes in almost tongue-in-cheek fashion in this paper, describing how he does therapy, and even telling on himself regarding the ways he lapses into relative ineffectiveness at times. Some of the points of emphasis include that Winnicott is patient-centered and non-directive. He follows the patient; it is not the other way around. Another is his understanding that the patient will make the therapist into whatever he imagines the therapist to be, irrespective of the therapist’s real characteristics. Winnicott recognizes that this openness to being painted in whatever colors the patient chooses occurs at the same time as the therapist stays rooted in external reality. In this way, given that the therapist is both a subjective object and a purveyor of reality, he becomes, in Winnicott’s words, a “transitional phenomenon”—representing both fantasy and reality at one and the same time.
