Reading Winnicott into Nano-Psychoanalysis: “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom”

Abstract

This article presents Winnicott's unique theoretical and clinical thinking, and especially his revision of the foundations of clinical psychoanalysis, as a Kuhnian paradigm shift that, as the title of the article indicates, I term nano-psychoanalysis. The title refers to ideas and terminology borrowed from nanoscience and nanotechnology, and particularly to physicist Richard Feynman's 1959 visionary talk that hailed nanotechnology and its radical potential: “There's plenty of room at the bottom—An Invitation to Enter a new Field of Physics.” I have paraphrased and applied it to Winnicott and to psychoanalysis: “There's plenty of room at the bottom—an invitation to enter nano-psychoanalysis,” and regard Winnicott as the originator of nano-psychoanalysis. For Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory, and particularly his clinical-technical theory with its emphasis on regression in the treatment of more disturbed patients, share the fundamental principle offered by Feynman and nanotechnology—that of going back to the bottom, to the elemental early states and processes, and to early mothering techniques, thereby enabling the initiation of formative developmental processes. This means moving beyond the space-time confines of traditional clinical psychoanalysis to work with primal processes in the treatment experience and setting, thus reaching and correcting basic self-processes and unthinkable early trauma—and enlarging the scope of psychoanalytic practice. It is a quest for clinical psychoanalysis at its most formative edge.

The article explores the radical vision of Winnicott's clinical thinking and his theory of regression, comparing it to the psychoanalytic thinking of his two contemporaries—Balint in London and Nacht in Paris—who also dealt with the ideas of primary states and therapeutic regression in the psychoanalytic situation, but with rather restrained and cautious clinical-theoretical conclusions. Winnicott's 1955 letter to Bion, and the story of the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter offer further points of relating to Winnicott's singular ideas.

Acknowledgments

A shorter version of this paper was read at the launching of the Hebrew translation of a collection of Winnicott's papers entitled True Self, False Self (June, 2009).

Notes

¹I learned about Loparic's article “Winnicott's Paradigm Outlined,” which was translated into English and available online, only after I wrote this article, and I am impressed by the ways our views amplify each other in this regard.

²Winnicott believed in “making the study of human nature a science, a process characterized by observation of the facts, by the building of theory and the testing of it, and by modification of theory according to the discovery of new facts” (1945b, p. 5).

³Chris Toumey (2008), a cultural anthropologist, has reconstructed the history of the publication and republication of Feynman's talk over the years in his article “Reading Feynman into Nanotechnology”—a title that I also paraphrase and use here.

⁴It is interesting to note the similarity of expressions between Winnicott, Feynman, and nano-physicists regarding these yet-to-be-known realms. Winnicott wrote at the beginning of his key paper “Primitive emotional development” (1945a), “About the primitive emotional development there is a great deal that is not known or properly understood, at least by me” (p. 145). And nanotechnology physicists have written,

“It is often observed that such systems may possess entirely new physical and chemical characteristics. … The new properties result from phenomena such as quantum confinement that occurs in the nanoscale dimensions, and in many instances the origins of the new properties are, at present, not fully understood. Our ability to use these new properties … lies in our ability to understand the underlying physics that governs them. (NIST Physics Laboratory, Nanotechnology, 2007).

⁵For an explanation of what I view as the quantum-like psychoanalytic counterpart, see Eshel (2002, 2010).

⁶In its two meanings: “In the present and in the process of actualization, that is, trying to bring into existence what didn't happen” (Pontalis, 2003, p. 45).

⁷From my clinical experience, I would add severe sexual perversions to this list (Eshel, 2005).

⁸Winnicott, I think, has introduced the most extreme theoretical and clinical-technical psychoanalytic thinking, originating in earliest human infancy. However, the use of nano principles in clinical psychoanalysis—the shift toward primal forms—does not have to be limited solely to mother-infant natural processes and states, as can be seen in the writings of Searles (1961, 1986) and Bottela and Botella (2005).