Intersubjective Winnicott

"To write the lives of the great in a way that separates them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves."

—Simone Weil, in a review of
Karl Marx by Otto Rühle

Without any obfuscating stress on Winnicott's pettiness, the California psychoanalyst, F. Robert Rodman, unambiguously conveys Winnicott's greatness. Winnicott was, of course, one of the major architects of the transformation of psychoanalysis into a theory and practice much more attuned than it had been in Freud's time to the intersubjective factors shaping our psychology. Winnicott also emphasized the ways in which we protect ourselves against the risk of being submerged in another, claiming that what he called the True Self "never communicates with the world of perceived objects, and . . . knows that it must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality" (1963, 187).

Respecting Winnicott's emphasis on "the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found" (1963, 185), Rodman concentrates on Winnicott's public achievement. Anyone reading this book solely for details of his life will be disappointed. Not that the details are not there. These include Winicott's complaining to Marion Milner that he had been "weaned early because his mother could not stand her own excitement during breast feeding" (Rodman 2003, 14). Rodman cites, as Adam Phillips (1988) and others have before him, "The Tree," a poem composed by Winnicott when he was sixty-seven in which he wrote, apparently apropos himself and his mother, "Once, stretched out on her lap / As now on a dead tree / I learned to make her smile / . . . / To enliven her was my living" (290). Rodman examines how Winnicott sought to meet the needs of other key women in his life: his first wife, Alice Taylor; his second analyst, Joan Riviere; his second wife, Clare Britton; and his psychoanalytic colleagues, Melanie Klein and Marion Milner.

Rodman recounts how Winnicott characterized himself as having been "too nice" (19) as a child, but that he attributed his father's sending him to boarding school to his having said "Drat" (24). We learn too of Winnicott's Third Class degree in Biology at Cambridge; his medical studies in London; his beginning work as a pediatrician in 1920; and the start of his evidently unconsummated marriage, from 1923 till 1951, to Alice Taylor, a potter who was slightly older than he and regarded as "dotty" (65). Shortly after marrying Alice, Winnicott began a ten-year analysis with James Strachey, through whom, already intrigued by children's fantasies, he first learned of the work of Melanie Klein.

The story is by now well-known that Winnicott asked Klein to analyze him, but that she refused because she wanted him to analyze her son, Erich, leading him to seek further analysis instead with Joan Riviere. This analysis, according to Rodman's account, began at the end of 1936. The previous year Klein had written of how the baby's innate fantasies (or "phantasies" as she put it) of love and hate become integrated into the "depressive position" (1935, 271). She believed this state of mind recurs in both children and adults, and that it involves anxiety, guilt, and dread lest fantasies about what is hated and bad damage or drive away what is loved as good. Riviere described this dejected state as a situation in which "all one's loved ones within are dead and destroyed, all goodness is dispersed, lost, in fragments, wasted and scattered to the winds; nothing is left within but utter desolation" (1936, 313; italics in original). Winnicott, by contrast, as Rodman notes, was concerned not only with the inner world but also with how it is conditioned by our intersubjective involvement with others.

Rodman begins his book with "Primitive Emotional Development," which Winicott presented to the British Society on November 28, 1945. Thomas Ogden describes this essay as...