On Being "Intrinsical": A Winnicott Enigma

Introduction

One of the fascinations about Winnicott is his ability to surprise. It is not just that his writings are often paradoxical. They are often so unexpected. In this paper I want to pursue one such unexpected strand. My quest is more personal than textual, my interest the complex individuality of Winnicott rather than the inner coherence and continuity of his thought. In this endeavor I am prompted by a passage of Susanne Langer, a writer whose interests and perspective in the philosophical sphere were closely akin to those of Winnicott the psychologist and clinician. She writes:

The occurrence of a thought is an event in a thinker's personal history, and has as distinct a qualitative character as an adventure, a sigh, or a human contact; it is not a proposition, but an entertainment of one, which necessarily involves vital tensions, feelings, the imminence of other thoughts, and the echoes of past thinking.

(1953, 219)

In the autobiographical journal that he began writing near the end of his life Winnicott made the following observation, almost as an aside, in the course of some private musings on death:

so many of my friends and contemporaries died in the first World War, and I have never been free from 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.

(qtd. in C. Winnicott 1990, 6)

There are at least three points worth noting about this passage. Firstly, there is his explicit acknowledgment of past loss. Nowhere else in his writings did Winnicott allude so directly to the personal impact on him of the death of friends and contemporaries in the First World War. Secondly, he mentions the abiding effect of this experience of past loss on his continuing sense of existence in the present. Again, this is unusual in that it appears to be the only occasion on which Winnicott describes the experience of "being alive" in terms of a sense of belonging to some larger unity—"a crystal." Elsewhere, it was his habit to attend to the very opposite characteristics of aliveness, namely, unity, integrity, and the sense of "being in one's own body," all of these phrases emphasizing the individual rather than the communal aspect of one's sense of one's own existence. Thirdly, there is his strange choice of vocabulary, poetic and somewhat archaic, culminating in the highly unusual term "intrinsical." Not only does Winnicott never employ the term elsewhere, but the Oxford English Dictionary, in listing the few references to this obsolete epithet, gives no instance of its occurrence in conjunction with the preposition "in," as Winnicott uses it here, in the phrase "[a] shape intrinsical in it."

What are we to make of these several oddities? Winnicott's style can sometimes be opaque, and occasionally idiosyncratic. This is usually when he wants to sound a provocative note, or else is aiming to evoke a deeper, less defended response in his readers. Here, though, the situation is different. This is in the nature of a private, personal communication on which we are eavesdropping. It is possible that Winnicott never envisaged the passage from which I have quoted being read by anyone other than his wife. Certainly, there can be little doubt about its totally spontaneous and authentic character.

So we must take what he writes here as reflecting his true sentiments; true moreover, not as sentiments freshly articulated ("a new realization"), but as the expression of a settled outlook on life and death. Moreover, there is no sense that this present acknowledgment, of his own being alive as a "facet of some one thing of which their deaths [were] other facets," is something paradoxical, still less a retraction of what he had previously thought and stated.

Nevertheless, there appears to be something enigmatic about this forceful declaration when taken in the context of...