Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the particular use of Winnicott pursued in the book, situating his ideas within an increasingly toxic and unsustainable working world. Novel links are offered between Winnicott’s long-standing focus on early childhood and the environment of work that predates, surrounds and now threatens to engulf it. The specter of the “absent self” is presented to convey a type of extreme false self inculcated by work’s intergenerational and systemic impoverishment. The chapter also distinguishes this more radical use of Winnicott from prior uses, demonstrating how one of the most original thinkers in psychoanalysis can shed penetrating light on the depths of worker despair, while at the same facilitate a much-needed renaissance of criticality in organization studies.