Preface

The theme of this issue of American Imago is close to my heart. In my own psychoanalytic odyssey, I long ago came to the conclusion that the most promising way forward from the foundational but in some respects deeply flawed work of Freud was opened up by the Independent tradition of British psychoanalysis, whose best-known representative is D. W. Winnicott. Needless to say, I recognize that I am far from alone in my admiration for Winnicott, and also that many distinguished scholars and analysts would place other luminaries from the past—and the traditions they embody—higher in their personal pantheons.

As an editor, I am committed to including the broadest possible range of theoretical perspectives—as well as thoughtful critiques of psychoanalysis—in the pages of American Imago. But it gives me particular pleasure to be able to present to our readers a sampling of those who are speaking up on behalf of what I personally believe to be the best that psychoanalysis has to offer.

Apart from their theoretical differences, what most profoundly sets Winnicott apart from those figures who represent alternative traditions of psychoanalysis—most notably, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan—is that Winnicott resolutely opposed dogmatism and fanaticism and refused to turn psychoanalysis into a religious cult. As the incomparable Nina Coltart, who is quoted by both Linda Hopkins and Stuart Pizer in their contributions to this issue, put it in her interview with Anthony Molino (1997), "The Kleinians are religious. They are a religious movement, while the rest of us aren't. And fanatical religious movements believe that they possess the truth, and are prepared to impose it at practically any cost on other people" (172).¹ That the same charge can be leveled at Lacan emerges from Molino's interview with Joyce McDougall, who describes Winnicott as "the most important influence on my thinking" (58) but who also worked closely with Lacan. McDougall recalls how, when she visited Lacan at the time of the split in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, he told her: "'Everyone will come to me. Everybody. Because I have the answer'" (62). She elaborates, "He went on to explain in a messianic way that he had something very special to offer, that he had great news for psychoanalysis and that everybody would come to learn from him." Although I think it is clear why the attitudes of both Klein and Lacan should be rejected, this does not mean that there is not a great deal to be learned from their contributions to psychoanalysis. As McDougall, with characteristic generosity of spirit, goes on to observe, "Even if you come up with ideas that in the long run differ from those of the person who's inspired you, you've made a worthwhile intellectual voyage. Melanie Klein's work does this to me as well. It's stimulating and even if you don't agree with it all, it's well worth struggling to grasp its essentials, and I found the same with Lacan" (64).

Christopher Reeves, a retired child psychotherapist and former editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, trained in the Department of Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic during John Bowlby's tenure as chair of that program while at the same time completing a Ph.D. in philosophy under Richard Wollheim at University College, London. For two years he attended clinical seminars run by Donald Winnicott. Dr. Reeves was for many years associated with the Mulberry Bush School, where he acted as Therapeutic Adviser in succession to its founder, Barbara Dockar-Drysdale, a close associate of Winnicott's, before becoming its Principal.

Reeves's beautiful paper takes off from a passage in Winnicott's late autobiographical journal in which he describes the death of his friends and contemporaries in World War I as having left him with "the feeling that my being alive is a facet of some one thing of which their deaths can be seen as other facets: some huge crystal, a body with integrity and shape intrinsical in it." Paying close...