Tilts and Drives: Commentary on “Donald Winnicott and Stephen Mitchell’s Developmental Tilt Hypothesis Reconsidered” by Steven Cooper

ABSTRACT

Steven Cooper’s lucid and persuasive paper (this issue) brings to our attention the many ways in which Winnicott was unfairly represented in Stephen Mitchell’s paper on the developmental tilt in psychoanalytic theorizing. Winnicott is not to be boxed; his writing and his practice reach forward into issues of play and intersubjective airiness seemingly unrecognized in Mitchell’s paper. At the same time, it is important to recognize the ways in which Winnicott subscribed to a particular model of mind. This included both drive and the idea of regression, in both development and treatment. Winnicott’s writing puts him in a transitional space, between Freud and the relational theories that were to come.

This article refers to:

Donald Winnicott and Stephen Mitchell’s Developmental Tilt Hypothesis Reconsidered

View responses to this article:

The Collision between Comparative Theory and Dialectical Thinking: Response to Benjamin, Schwartz Cooney, and Swartz

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sally Swartz

Emeritus Associate Professor Sally Swartz, Ph.D., is a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a particular interest in the fields of colonial psychiatric history, decolonization, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in South Africa. Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century was published by UCT Press in 2015, and Ruthless Winnicott: The Role of Ruthlessness in Psychoanalysis and Political Protest by Routledge in 2019.