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Abstract
Reading Winnicott’s writings in reverse order reveals a major unacknowledged turning-point in his thinking. Based on the unveiling of this development it is proposed that: 1) It is only in his late writings that Winnicott makes a wholehearted shift to a monistic view of psychic energy, 2) The paradoxical joining of two opposing forces, taken together with the unification of “primitive love” and “motility” into a single energy source, as suggested in “The use of an object,” was the missing step that enabled Winnicott’s final shift to monistic thinking, 3) This shift allows to identify motility as the energetic origin of human behavior, and 4) Restoring the connection between aggression and motility is a major curative factor.
Notes
1 The article’s full title is “The use of an object and relating through identifications.” It was first presented as a lecture in New York on November 1968.
2 Jan Abram also recognized the importance of this footnote as is indicated in her 2013 paper (p. 51).
3 In the preface to Human Nature (1988), Clare Winnicott writes: “The first draft of the book was begun and completed in a comparatively short space of time in the summer of 1954, but ever since then until the time of his death it was under review and revision” (p. xi).
4 The terms “love” and “strife” are taken from Empedocles, a Greek philosopher of the fifth century BCE. Empedocles spoke of these two principles, which rule life and which are in eternal conflict with each other.
5 The combining of the two terms into a single one, “love-strife,” is unique to Winnicott. It clearly and concisely encapsulates Winnicott’s movement away from the Freudian paradigm and expresses his transition to monism.
6 Winnicott uses this term to designate free, uninhibited, bodily movement (Elkins Citation2015).
7 Statements indicating that all these terms, when used by Winnicott, apply to the same source of energy can be found in Winnicott Citation1939, p. 84; Citation1963a, p. 74; Citation1958, p. 31; Citation1960a, p. 45; Citation1959-1964, p. 127.
8 From Freud’s perspective, the Jungian view, by desexualizing the libido and defining it as the single psychic source of energy, invalidates the entire psychoanalytic enterprise (Benyamini Citation2008).
9 In “Creativity and its origins” (1966, p. 80), there is a single sentence in which Winnicott links satisfaction and the processes of recognizing the externality of the object: “Drive satisfaction enhances the separation of the object from the baby, and leads to objectification of the object.” This is the only place I have found a statement heralding what he would formulate fully only in 1968a.
10 The object placement process is the developmental process by which the child advances from a subjective to an objective view of the object. Winnicott presents a description and understanding of this complex and important process in “The use of an object.”
11 Winnicott is not the first to link movement to life. Thomas Hobbes and Blaise Pascal are among the most familiar philosophers who addressed the subject: “Life is but motion” (Hobbes Citation1651); “Our nature consists in motion. Complete rest is death” (Pascal Citation1969).
12 It is interesting to note that Freud viewed the muscular system as the location of the death drive (Quinodoz Citation2005).
13 As he puts it: “a great deal happens prior to the first feed” (1950–1955, p. 213).
14 The connection between movement and development is palpable in Winnicott’s “kernel and shell” model, which will be elaborated upon in the following section. Also, it is interesting to note that, in one of his final lectures (“Individuation,” October 1970), when illustrating the process of emotional growth as a function of mother-child relations, Winnicott offers an example not of an infant suckling his mother’s breast but rather of an infant kicking its mother’s breast. In other words, Winnicott chose here to replace “mouth-love” with motility even when observing the mother-child interaction during nursing.
15 Winnicott illustrates this model both thru accounts of specific developmental processes, and with the help of diagrams (1952b).
16 An example of this line of thought is Winnicott's perception of anti-social behavior as a sign of hope (1956b, 1967b). Specifically, within the conceptual framework presented in this paper, it can be said that hope, which can be considered as an aspect of the life force, when distorted by consistent deprivation, may express itself through anti-social (aggressive) behavior.
17 Such a discussion would have to address, among other things, the clinical implications of an approach that is not based on a model of conflict, and according to which “good” and “bad” are not primary.
18 “In psychoanalytic practice, the positive changes that come about in this area can be profound. They do not depend on interpretive work. They depend on the analyst’s survival of the attacks” (1969a, p. 91).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Osnat Erel
Osnat Erel is a training and supervising analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society.