In a frank and frankly irreverent introductory passage to his “Primitive Emotional Development” from the mid-1940s, Winnicott wrote: “I shall not first give an historical survey and show the development of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle down to clinical experience, form my own theories and then, last of all, interest myself in looking to see where I stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any” (145).
Winnicott’s thievery here is hardly unfamiliar to those of us who track the vagaries of the unconscious as a primary process, as, in other words, a process that admits little of continuity (in time and space) or boundary (in property and reason). However, that such thievery also robs the question of provenance of its primacy and instead relegates it to the status of an afterthought, that the thievery may be “as good a method as any” in matters meta-psychological, and, furthermore, that it may eventually seep into and indeed direct whatever may come about as a psychoanalytic intervention is less evident to and significantly less reassuring for those clinicians who stake their professional standing and therapeutic competence on a mastery in matters of aetiology and development.
What I find most interesting about Winnicott’s strategy is that it speaks of a work that is always in progress, a work that has already begun (“this and that”) somewhere (“here and there”), a work that is grounded in neither an overarching theory nor a coherent set of clinical observations, but in a multiplicity of ideas and experiences. Winnicott’s is a porous work that mines in this multiplicity certain connections that may produce new theories, which, in turn, will hopefully serve as the “this and that” and the “here and there” of future episodes of work.
In one sense then, the components (abstractions, techniques, and vignettes) that have been gathered under the heading of “Winnicott” and identified as the benchmarks of what it means to be a “Winnicottian” are multiple and multiply sourced. They are heterogeneous, anachronistic, and sometimes even idiosyncratic. Last but not least, and though in a sense specific to Winnicott, such components nevertheless make themselves available as the potential raw materials of subsequent projects, psychoanalytic or otherwise, that may have little if anything to do with “Winnicott” or “Winnicottians.”
Trailing closely behind an investment in Winnicottian playfulness is the inevitable question of responsibility. What might be the risks of such playfulness sinking into either a “playing fast and loose” with the poignantly existential moments in the life of an individual or a form of intellectual gymnastics of interest only to its practitioner and, at best, a handful amongst his or her audience? Surely, the objection will be raised, the efforts of a theorist attempting to contribute to the understanding of the human psyche or of a clinician charged with the responsibility of alleviating another person’s suffering must outweigh, in both subtlety and impact, the playful meanderings of a mere child.
A healthy degree of reservation, if not indeed suspicion, seems well justified in response to any equivalence drawn between the impromptu squiggles of a two-year-old and the meta-psychological cogitations of, say, a fifty-two-year-old, unless, obviously, the latter are as easily reproducible, as superficial, and, ultimately, as inconsequential and dispensable as the former.
My response to this objection is twofold.
First, I do not consider the qualities of superficiality or dispensability, no matter how difficult it has been to generate the products they qualify, as markers of intellectual and/or clinical inadequacy. Winnicott recommends that psychoanalysis is best served by a practitioner who can curb the wish to dissect and catalogue and who can relinquish the need to have the final word, a practitioner who can occupy the position of an instigator of play rather than of a technician of truth. Such a practitioner must not only be intellectually and affectively agile, he or she must also tolerate the fact that, within the context of any particular analysis, his or her every experience and thought is potentially dispensable and the theories and strategies that guide that analysis, no matter how firmly grounded, are forever subject to a startling upset. Such precariousness is hardly a detriment to the practice of analysis; on the contrary, it propels it. For better or for worse, the analysis that has little room for surprise, and even less for curiosity, is no longer an analysis.
Second, the playfulness I am invoking here is hardly the carelessness that is of legitimate concern to the advocates of clinical sobriety. Rather, it is a playfulness that operates somewhere between objective reality and private fancy, between an abiding faith in the laws of causality and an utter disregard for consequences, between truth and myth, linearity and chaos.
