Ruthless Winnicott


Book Description

Ruthless Winnicott is an extended exploration of the role of ruthlessness in psychic development. That survival is of no use unless it is preceded by a ruthless attack is one of D. W. Winnicott’s most resonant paradoxes. The book links this with the search for subjective freedom for those traumatized by colonialism, and in doing so draws on the work of Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary psychoanalytic thinker Frantz Fanon. Sally Swartz examines essential pieces of Winnicott’s work on ruthlessness as central to the emergence of concern for the Other. She illustrates, with clinical examples, ways in which the ruthless use of the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic space allows the patient either to enter fully into a process that allows growth, or to defend ruthlessly against the anxieties provoked by psychic change. Ruthless Winnicott also maps decolonial challenges to psychoanalytic theory, and the role of ruthlessness in protest movements demanding radical subjective change. Swartz’s exploration of ruthlessness as both zest and defense in individual development and in protest movements illuminates processes of psychological collision and change. It traces links between individual trauma and collective turbulence, and maps ways in which ruthlessness is essential to subjective change. Ruthless Winnicott will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars of colonialism, decolonization and post-colonialism.




The Language of Winnicott


Book Description

The author's lexicon - The Language of Winnicott - has proved to be the definitive comprehensive guide to Winnicott's thought since it was first published in 1996, Winnicott's centenary Year. The twenty-two entries represent the major conceptualisations in Winnicott's theories and take the reader on a journey through his writings that span from 1931 to 1971. Thus the volume is an anthology of Winnicott's writings. This new edition expands on each original entry predicated on the author's research discoveries, including archival material, over the past decade.




Winnicott


Book Description

Describes Winnicott's theories of child development, the mother-child relationship, and human sexuality.




Donald W. Winnicott and the History of the Present


Book Description

In November 2015, The Winnicott Trust held a major conference in London to celebrate the forthcoming publication of the Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. Most of the papers given then now constitute the chapters in this book. It not only reflects the ongoing contemporary relevance of Winnicott's work, clinical and theoretical, but these chapters demonstrate the aliveness of Winnicott's contribution as present day practitioners and academics use his ideas in their own way. The chapters range from accounts of the early developmental processes and relationships (Roussillon, Murray), the psychoanalytic setting (Bolognini, Bonaminio, Fabozzi, Joyce, Hopkins) creativity and the arts (Wright, Robinson), Winnicott in the outside world (Kahr, Karpf), to the challenge to the psychoanalytic paradigm that Winnicott's ideas constitute (Loparic).




On Coming into Possession of Oneself


Book Description

This book is Donnel B. Stern’s latest contribution to the kind of understanding of the psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic process offered by field theory. Stern anchors his understanding of therapeutic action in the freedom of both patient and analyst to create a meaningful experience with minimum inhibition. The field’s capacity to generate meaning—and thus to make possible fully realized human living—rows from its freedom to respond spontaneously to the feelings, wants, and needs of its participants. To whatever extent this spontaneity is diminished, as it is in unconscious mutual enactment, we can be sure that some part of the field is frozen or otherwise rigidified. This position serves as the foundation of the psychoanalysis that Stern practices. The analyst aims to feel their way into compromises in the field, and then do whatever they can to grasp and dissolve them, knowing that they will have to be visited repeatedly, and dissolved again. These insights into interpersonal and relational field theory lead to descriptions of clinical interventions that are focused on the moment-to-moment emotional experience of both the patient and the analyst. With valuable contributions to theory and emotionally immediate clinical vignettes, this book is essential for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wishing to understand how the analyst’s interventions grow from the analyst’s emotional involvement in the clinical process.




Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis


Book Description

What does it feel like to encounter ourselves and one another as implicated subjects, both in our everyday lives and in the context of our work as clinicians, and how does this matter? With contributions from a diverse group of relational psychoanalytic thinkers, this book reads Michael Rothberg’s concept of the implicated subject—the notion that we are continuously implicated in injustices even when not perpetrators—as calling us to elaborate what it feels like to inhabit such subjectivities in relation to others both similarly and differently situated. Implication and anti-Black racism are central to many chapters, with attention given to the unique vulnerability of racial minority immigrants, to Native American genocide, and to the implication of ordinary Israelis in the oppression of Palestinians. The book makes the case that the therapist’s ongoing openness to learning of our own implication in enactments is central to a relational sensibility and to a progressive psychoanalysis. As a contribution to the necessary and long-overdue conversation within the psychoanalytic field about racism, social injustice, and ways to move toward a just society, this book will be essential for all relational psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.




Difference and Disavowal


Book Description

Difference and Disavowal is a major rethinking of a central tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis--the repression theory. It centers on fundamental issues in practice and theory, beginning with a central conundrum for clinical psychoanalysis: how to understand apparently analyzable patients who resist the essential therapeutic measure of analysis--interpretation. The author finds the answer in a revision and expansion of Freud's theory of fetishism. Freud introduced the defense mechanism of disavowal in order to understand what he called the registration and repudiation of reality in fetishism. However, his understanding of the reality disavowed in fetishism is self-contradictory. The contradiction in Freud's argument can be resolved by understanding disavowal in terms of registration and repudiation of difference. The patients who resist interpretation register and repudiate the differentiating process implicit in every interpretation. The problem of resistance to interpretation expands the basic conception of the unconscious to include registration and repudiation of differentiating, processive reality. Freud's conception of an unconscious force that simultaneously differentiates, binds, and raises tension levels--Eros--demands integration with the theory of disavowal. This integration produces a theory of an inevitable trauma, an inevitable registration and repudiation of difference, as an essential element in psychoanalytic theories of mind, psychopathology, and treatment. At the end of his life Freud himself was beginning to rethink repression as the cornerstone of his work. He was beginning to see disavowal as the foundation of defensive process. Once disavowal is understood in relation to difference and Eros, one has a major tool with which to rethink the development of Freudian psychoanalysis from its earliest days to the present. The author shows how other analysts--such as Ferenczi, Abraham, Klein, Loewald, and Winnicott--have unwittingly but crucially contributed to the problem of resistance to interpretation




The Evolution of Winnicott's Thinking


Book Description

What happens to the thinking of a thinker who refuses a discipleship? This book attempts to answer this question in relation to D. W. Winnicott and the evolution of his thinking. He eschewed a following, privileging the independence of his thinking and fostering the same in others. However Winnicott's thinking exerts a growing influence in areas including psychoanalysis, psychology, and human development. This book looks at the nature of Winnicott's thought and its influence. It first examines the development of Winnicott's thinking through his own life time (first generation) and then continues this exploration by viewing the thinking in members of the group with a strong likelihood of influence from him; his analysands (second generation) and their analysands (third generation).




Birth Passages


Book Description

Birth Passages offers a provocative and eloquent challenge to the nostalgia for the maternal, sometimes influenced by classic Freudian theory, which pervades many discourses. Theresa M. Krier suggests an alternative to the common characterizations of "the maternal" as a force inspiring both desire and dread, a force that must be repressed if subjectivity and culture are to be established. Instead, drawing on the work of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Luce Irigaray, Krier seeks to establish a new model of the relationship between mother and infant, one in which birth is seen not as the tragic ending to the prenatal union but rather as the child's claiming both distance from and proximity to this parent. Krier's insightful readings of poetic works from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance show these texts in opposition to their cultures' insistent nostalgia for the maternal. Their authors, she maintains, recognize such longing as a symptom of a glamorous but false and disabling fantasy. In her analysis of the Song of Songs, Lucretius's De rerum natura, Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, Spenser's Amoretti and Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost and The Winter's Tale, Krier details how the writings represent the intersubjective nature of birth.




Accessing the Clinical Genius of Winnicott


Book Description

Donald Winnicott, psychoanalyst and pediatrician, is viewed by many in the psychodynamic field as the “other genius” in the history of psychodynamic theory and practice, along with Freud. This book selects and explores twelve of his most infl uential clinical papers. Winnicott’s works have been highly valued in the decades since they were first published, and are still relevant today. Winnicott’s writings on the goals and techniques of psychodynamic psychotherapy have been foundational, in that he recast Freudian- and Kleinian-infl uenced thinking in the direction of the more relational schools of psychotherapy that define current 21st-century psychodynamic practice. Winnicott’s writings help us to understand the maturational processes of children, certainly. But more than that, they help us to understand how best to intervene when the enterprise of childhood leads to compromises of psychological health in later years. Yet, despite Winnicott’s influence and continuing relevance, his writings, while at some level simple, are elusive to modern readers. For one thing, he writes in the psychoanalytic genre of the 1930s-1960s, whose underlying theoretical assumptions and vocabulary are obscure in the present day and, for another, his writing often reflects primary process thinking, which is suggestive, but not declarative. In this work, Teri Quatman provides explanations and insight, in an interlocution with Winnicott’s most significant papers, exploring both his language and concepts, and enabling the clinician to emerge with a deep and reflective understanding of his thoughts, perspectives, and techniques. Engaging and accessible, Accessing the Clinical Genius of Winnicott will be of great use to anyone encountering Winnicott for the first time, particularly in psychodynamic psychotherapeutic training, and in the teaching of relational psychotherapies.




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