ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is often viewed as a practice relevant only to educated people of means. This article describes a project that matches psychoanalytically trained clinicians with unhoused and formerly unhoused adults in a large urban community. D. W. Winnicott's ideas about impingement, the holding environment, fear of breakdown, and careful monitoring of the analyst's interiority have proven to be most valuable theoretical and clinical tools. A decade-long case example demonstrates the challenges and healing potentials of the work.
Subject(s)
Ill-Housed Persons , Psychoanalysis , Psychoanalytic Therapy , Humans , Ill-Housed Persons/psychology , Adult , Male , Professional-Patient Relations , Female , Psychoanalytic TheoryABSTRACT
On the 40th anniversary of its publication, the author re-reads Winnicott's The Piggle - a case of 'on demand analysis' with a child suffering from psychotic night terrors - in light of new information about the patient. Conversations between the author and 'Gabrielle' explore two areas not regarded as priorities by Winnicott: the transgenerational transmission of pathology/trauma, and the ways that language, in general - and given names, in particular - organize individual subjectivity. The question raised is to what degree Winnicott - who described the treatment as "psychoanalysis partagé [shared]" due to the parents' involvement - thought of the pathology itself as 'shared.' The goal is not to supplant but to expand Winnicott's understanding of the case, borrowing insights from the work of Lacan and others.
Subject(s)
Personal Narratives as Topic , Psychoanalysis , Adult , Child, Preschool , Female , History, 20th Century , Humans , Psychoanalysis/historyABSTRACT
The author, following André Green, maintains that the two most original psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud were Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Winnicott, it has been said, introduced the comic tradition into psychoanalysis, while Lacan sustained Freud's tragic/ironic vision. Years of mutual avoidance by their followers (especially of Lacan by Anglophone clinicians) has arguably diminished understanding of the full spectrum of psychoanalytic thought. The author outlines some basic constructs of Winnicott and of Lacan, including: their organizing tropes of selfhood versus subjectivity, their views of the "mirror stage", and their definitions of the aims of treatment. While the ideas of Winnicott and Lacan appear at some points complementary, the goal is not to integrate them into one master discourse, but rather to bring their radically different paradigms into provocative contact. A clinical vignette is offered to demonstrate concepts from Lacan and Winnicott, illustrating what it might mean to think and teach in the potential space between them.
