Abstract
In 2018 we began work on a set of reviews of the newly published Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, inviting an international group of psychoanalysts to each write on one of the volumes. The great surprise we have had in this project is the pleasure it has brought the reviewers. We are all agreed on the importance of this project and of Winnicott’s presence and impact on our field, but the pleasure and emotional meaning of every writer’s encounter (including ours) were indeed unexpected.
Here, in his review of Volume 5, Emanuel Berman elaborates an important insight into the period of work published in this volume (1955–1959). Berman speaks of two Winnicotts: the innovator and the traditionalist, each found both in formal papers of this period and in letters, where—as Berman notes—Winnicott’s tone is by turns amusing, sharp, and “haunted.” Winnicott moves—at once easily and painfully—between new breakthroughs and a comfortable placement in tradition. Berman notes that however evenly Winnicott balanced himself between innovation and existing models, we are at present most often attuned to what is new in his thinking.
Perhaps in Winnicott’s rapid oscillations between his profound loyalty to Freud and his radically innovative propositions, he may have been unconsciously enacting the distinction he was to later make between object relating and object use. That his love for Freud could survive his criticisms and deep disagreements allowed that love to become ever more generative as Winnicott embraced his own theoretical authority.