Parental Ambivalence

        The bulk of my discussion has focused on Winnicott’s parental metaphors: the analyst as, on one hand, the fatherly source of truth and discipline and, on the other, the motherly seat of comfort and safety. My choice of Winnicott as focus for a critique here is based in the fact that he occupies a rare and most peculiar position in the history of psychoanalysis as successor to one and progenitor to the other of these two metaphors.

        For all his shortcomings, Winnicott’s sense of the analytic relationship as essentially between an essentaily hermaphroditic parent and a conflicted/needy child allowed the analyst to recognise and speak a dynamic rarely referenced and addressed in the literature. In highlighting the constitutive function of hate in the countertransference, Winnicott points not only to the analyst’s inherently ambivalent stance vis à vis the analysand but also to that of the parent toward the child. André Green is yet another major theorist who has pursued a similar line of thought in suggesting that the Oedipal wish to kill the father need not be all that shocking considering the father had already experienced the son as a rival and acted on the wish to get rid of him.

        Winnicott and Green point not so much to a parenting that is failed, perverted, or derailed. Their observations strike at the core of our stock of platitudes that collapse the “healthy” onto the “loving” when it comes to child rearing. What is striking here is the resilience and longevity of such insipid and one-dimensional notions of parenting in the context of a therapeutic culture that, for the most part, has recognised ambivalence as a central psychological dynamic.