Introduction to Discussions from the Launch of the Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, 12-Volume Set, Edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson

Abstract

Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron introduce remarks delivered at The Sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School for Social Research, one of the North American launch sites for The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, 12-Volume Set. Harris and Aron discuss the experience of seeing Winnicott—the man, doctor, psychoanalyst, and public intellectual—unfold over time, an experience they credit to the “brilliant choice” of the volumes’ editors to present Winnicott’s work in strictly chronological order. The authors, founders (with Jeremy Safran) of the Ferenczi Center, go on to argue that theirs was a particularly relevant and meaningful venue for the Winnicott launch given Ferenczi’s significant influcence on Winnicott, albeit one that Winnicott did not explicitly credit. With references to the existing literature on the topic of Ferenczi’s undocumented influence, they detail the theoretical points that make this case and argue that Winnicott represents a development within the Ferenczian legacy. Speakers include collection editors Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson, as well as volume editors Vincenzo Bonaminio, Angela Joyce, and Arne Jemstedt.

Keywords:

• The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott
• Sándor Ferenczi
• The Ferenczi Center
• Winnicott.

Notes

¹ For a written record of the proceedings of that first international conference, see Aron and Harris (1993).

² The Ferenczi Center was founded by and is under the direction of Jeremy Safran, Adrienne Harris, and Lewis Aron. For information, see http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/centers-special-programs/?id=104456.

³ See Leikerman (2001) for a persuasive argument that Klein was a product of Ferenczi at least as much as of Abraham.

⁴ The Ferenczi Center was founded by and is under the direction of Jeremy Safran, Adrienne Harris, and Lewis Aron (The New School for Social Research, n.d.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Harris

Lewis Aron, PhD, is the director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is cofounder of The Sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School for Social Research and coeditor of the Relational Perspectives Book Series (Routledge). He is author and editor of numerous books; his most recent, with Galit Atlas, is Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice (Routledge, 2017).

Lewis Aron

Adrienne Harris, PhD, identifies as a relational psychoanalyst with a strong interest in object relations theory, particularly the work of Winnicott, Green, and Rey. She situates the relational approach in a long history of field theories with links to the work of neo-Bionians and Winnicottian-inflected theories reflected in the work of Civitarese and Ferro. She would also see her work in the tradition of the politically and socially conscious Latin American theorists like Bleger, the Barangers, and Pichon-Rivière. She is faculty and supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is an editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. In 2009, she, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safran established The Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School University. She coedits the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, a series now with more than 70 published volumes. She is a member of the NGO, which the International Psychoanalytical Association developed to work with the United Nations, and she has been doing education and development on the problem of human trafficking. She is an editor of the International Psychoanalytical Association ejournal Psychoanalysis Today (www.psychoanalysis.today). She has written on topics in gender and development, analytic subjectivity, and the analytic community in the shadow of the First World War. Her current work is on analytic subjectivity, on intersectional models of gender and sexuality, and on ghosts.