Using Winnicott

Abstract

The psychoanalysis — both the theory and the practice — of Donald Winnicott exemplifies a quintessentially ‘psychosocial’ approach. Throughout his life and work, Winnicott was concerned with the conditions for subjectivity, and it was his unique insights into the mutually constitutive relations between the psyche and the social, the internal and the external worlds — particularly the ‘transitional phenomena’ — that allowed him to produce a truly psychosocial theory of the subject within the Object Relations tradition of psychoanalysis. His key starting point was the fact of human dependency. Where Klein produced theories based on hypotheses about the nature of human drives, Winnicott elaborated the key factor of human prematurity. The human infant, to a unique degree, is dependent on its caretaker. Dependency entails something on which to depend; this Winnicott labels ‘the environment’. Intra-uterinely, even in her desire for conception, as well as post-natally, the mother is the first environment. Notoriously, Winnicott claimed that there is no such thing as a baby without a mother; the baby cannot exist outside the environment on which it depends — prototypically, its mother.