Recognition in Winnicott’s “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications”

Wasteland of Destroyed Reality

“The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications” (Winnicott, 1968/2018a) ¹ is the inaugural section of the chapter in Psycho-Analytic Explorations titled “The Use of an Object.” Under this same title, the article was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and in a slightly revised version in Playing and Reality (Winnicott, 1971).

In the book, UO is accompanied by other brief texts by Winnicott on the same theme. I refer to “The Use of the Word ‘Use’” (Winnicott, 1968/2018b), “Clinical Illustration of ‘The Use of an Object’” (Winnicott, 1968/2018c), “Comments on My Paper ‘The Use of an Object’” (Winnicott, 1968/2018d), and “The Use of an Object in the Context of Moses and Monotheism” (Winnicott, 1969/2018e). Here, I will take all these works into account, as well as two earlier ones: “D.W.W.’s Dream Related to Reviewing Jung” (Winnicott, 1963/2018f) and “Notes Made on the Train” (Winnicott, 1965/2018g). To the mix, I would add at least the essays on the maternal unconscious (Winnicott, 1969/2018h) and on mutuality (Winnicott, 1969/2018i), which are from the same period and deal with the same themes.

The reprints attest to the success of UO. In it, Winnicott argues that as the mother withstands the destructiveness inherent in the primordial form of love expressed in the so-called oral sadism, the child pierces the bubble of omnipotence ² that protects him at birth but, if it persisted, would inhibit his growth. Then, he realizes that there is something out there that both transmits sensations of ecstatic pleasure and resists him. He also realizes that, in the grip of a powerful impulse of appropriation, obviously without intending to, he is trying to destroy this good but not entirely controllable thing, which now reveals itself to him as the object upon which his survival depends. In the process, the infant gradually comes to exist as a subject and to perceive the object as real and distinct.

The opening to the world is born under the sign of an image similar to that which Freud (1911/1958) places in a famous footnote of “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” of the little bird that, first enclosed in the eggshell, pierces it to get out. At first, it is not a reassuring vision. The territory of experiences that lies beyond the primitive sphere of the child’s omnipotence is precisely—perhaps, on Winnicott’s (1963/2018f) part, with intentional echoes of Eliot—a “wasteland of destroyed reality” (p. 230).

A sharp demarcation separates the two worlds and renders them irreconcilable, if it were not for the mediating function of the object. The mother allows the child to make increasingly frequent incursions to see what is beyond his imaginary realm, while preventing him from being overcome by a sense of catastrophe. In this way, as in the finale of The Road, the beautiful novel by Cormac McCarthy (2006) set in a postapocalyptic universe, the child discovers with surprise that the ruin is not total and that there are still possibilities for life. As one can intuit, this is how Winnicott constructs his own myth of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, simultaneously a figure of phylo- and ontogenesis.

For the themes it addresses and the way it does so, UO is a work of inestimable significance. Moreover, anticipating his death by just a couple of years, it represents the last overview that Winnicott could give on issues he considered of utmost importance.

However, it can be difficult to understand.

First of all, because it articulates numerous themes among themselves: birth of the psyche, origin and nature of aggression, physiological and pathological destructiveness, failures of therapy, technique of interpretation, and others.

Secondly, because it intertwines various levels of discourse in a way that can confuse the reader. For example, it deals with the role that the same element plays in the child’s relations with the object, whether there is still a state of undifferentiated, when the child is emerging from this state, or he has already completely exited it and become an adult.

It would be naive to claim that Winnicott’s essay and his concept of the destruction-survival dialectic have only or mainly a clinical value. The latter has its importance, even if, except in extreme cases, no mother is truly destroyed by her child. Moreover, this paper is not required to affirm the value of experiencing and containing conflict within the therapeutic relationship; numerous other psychoanalytic concepts already articulate this point. But if this essay is so extraordinary, it is because it also possesses a decidedly metapsychological and speculative character.

Similarly, regarding the problem of the birth of the subject, Winnicott oscillates between a biologistic-instinctual perspective of the psychology of the isolated subject (there is an innate or primary destructiveness, even if understood as a form of love), a relational perspective (subject and object interact from the outset), and a social-intersubjective perspective (subject and object give rise to a third or potential space).

It goes without saying that in the essay there is a high degree of originality, if not genius, and therefore it demands from the reader the effort to question a whole series of already acquired notions.

A true cross and delight, the typical use that Winnicott makes of simple words of everyday language to express key concepts of his discourse also contributes to unsettle the reader. Ironically, then, “wasteland of destroyed reality” could also stand for the landscape of certainties of the psychoanalytic world, which UO has continued to shake for half a century now.

Over time, several authors have already engaged in a real hand-to-hand combat with this essay, ³ which demonstrates its incredible vitality—there is no better proof to judge the quality of a text than how many new thoughts it gives rise to. Every reader who tries to make it his own destroys it and thus shows he loves it, and shows he loves it because he commits to destroying it. My reading, then, can only be a personal one—yet another moment in the ceaseless interrogation that every classic invites. If you will, and in defiance of all Winnicottian orthodoxy, it springs from that very “dilettantism” Barthes (1981/1985) so proudly claims as his signature style—driven not by arrogance, but by desire.

In fact, the first in the series was Winnicott himself. Dissatisfied with his essay, as can be seen from annotations like “I realize that it is this idea of a destructive first impulse that is difficult to grasp. . . . Just here one must allow obscurity to have a value that is superior to false clarification” (Winnicott, 1968/2018d, p. 240), while already in the past he had commented that confusion could arise “through our using the term aggression sometimes when we mean spontaneity” (Winnicott, 1950/1958a, p. 217), he committed himself to rewriting it until the end of his life.

Naturally, the challenge that UO poses to us is to decide where the line passes that distinguishes confusion from the ambiguity that generates new thoughts. From a certain point of view, I agree with Elkins (2017, p. 110) that in a rereading one can only ask to make the text more difficult, not less difficult. This corresponds to Bion’s (1963, 1970) idea of psychoanalysis as a probe that gradually expands the perimeter of the environment it is exploring.

Why Reread UO?

The reason for returning to UO, and what prompts me not only to reread it but also to annotate some reflections on my experience—so to speak, writing the essay in the act of reading it ⁴ —is twofold. First of all, I am intrigued by the point where Winnicott asserts that what lies in between, as an evolutionary step, between the child’s capacity to relate to the object and the capacity to use the object is “recognition” (p. 222). To better understand how analysis heals, I have been interested in this concept for some time but from other perspectives—the theories of intersubjectivity by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (Civitarese, 2021a, 2021b, 2025a). In the text, the word “recognition” appears only once but does not go unnoticed. Winnicott describes the event it signifies, or rather, its failure, as “the most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development; or the most irksome of all the early failures that come for mending” (p. 222).

So, I anticipate that, in my opinion, Winnicott’s essay is an extraordinary contribution to a psychoanalytic conception of recognition—provided we do not understand it trivially as an exclusively voluntary, conscious, legalistic act, that is, limited to the sphere of rights and duties. In this, he resonates with Hegel’s theory of the dialectic of recognition (Anerkennung) and reconciliation (Versöhnung). Winnicott does not explicitly cite it, but hinting at this affinity helps clarify his theses and perhaps integrate them: as we will see, to conceive that “destruction” is both reciprocal and real.

Not dissimilar is Bion’s theory of at-one-ment ⁵ as the mechanism that underlies psychic growth and is the essence of therapeutic action in analysis. In this sense, indirectly—that is, without mentioning it—Winnicott delves in his own way into Bion’s (1962a, 1962b) theory of thinking. I am referring to the breast/no-breast or thing/no-thing rhythm as what lies at the origin of the symbol (Civitarese, 2019), or the relationship between the child’s projective identification and the mother’s capacity for rêverie—and confirms its value.

The second, even more intimate impulse for rereading UO lies in the need to clarify why I feel a sense of annoying estrangement (and at the same time fascination) regarding the usage—which seems to me idiosyncratic and somewhat confusing (at least at first glance)—that Winnicott makes of the terms “relating,” “use,” and “destruction.” Initially, it seemed to me like a provocation aimed at the reader, perhaps conceived to stimulate attention and create a climate of suspense. A possible explanation is found in the note where Winnicott deplores the fact that familiarity with certain words leads us to be

so dulled to their usage that we need from time to time to take each one and to look at it, and to determine in so far as we are able . . . the ways in which we are using the word now. (Winnicott, 1968/2018b, p. 233)

This is exactly what the languages of dreams and poetry do. For this reason, I would say that Winnicott is in tune with Merleau-Ponty’s (2003/2010) proposal to consider psychoanalysis as a sort of “hermeneutic rêverie” (p. 254).

Relating

UO begins by posing a specific clinical problem: the interminable analysis. Winnicott writes that he can now see things in a new way because of all he has learned: prioritizing experience, knowing how to wait for the natural evolution of the healing process without interrupting it by giving interpretations, and distinguishing between “interpretations as such” and “the making of interpretations,” renouncing the personal need to feel intelligent, remembering that “it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers” (p. 219).

As an aside, these are concepts that correspond precisely to those of Bion: learning from experience, the patient as the best colleague, negative capability, being open to communicating in a nonverbal manner rather than systematically privileging verbal communication.

So what happens in the interminable analysis? The analysand and analyst remain in an immature relationship. The patient has not yet become capable of “using” the analyst. He treats him as a subjective object, not separate from himself or not real.

Winnicott explains that the analyst may mobilize the patient’s false self to prevent the termination of the analysis, thus mutually guaranteeing a source of gratification; that this would be a failure of the treatment, but if recognized, could have some utility; that the analysis thus uselessly prolonged at least makes the risk of suicide less critical, since the patient realizes that as time passes, it is more likely he will die of illness or accident (sic); that, in short, as long as it lasted, the whole thing was also amusing, and so on.

However, the fact remains that “the analysis never ends,” madness can remain “undiscovered and unaddressed,” and this is a failure. Analysis is not a “modus vivendi”; the ideal is instead that at the conclusion of the analysis, patients come to forget about the analyst.

At this point, however, there arises the need to clarify what it means that the patient is not capable of using the analyst and instead can only remain in the immature relationship that Winnicott calls “relating to the object.” Before tackling the distinction that is at the heart of the work, Winnicott makes a parenthetical note, which we should, however, take out of the parentheses and highlight—in the same way that he himself confesses to being “somewhat addicted to [Freud’s] footnotes” (p. 244).

I am referring to the two lines where he specifies that he will omit discussing the concept of crossed projective identifications, since these can only be considered in the most advanced phase of a person’s emotional development, which corresponds to the acquisition of the capacity to use the object. I will return to this topic later, but I have decided to mention this passage immediately, following the order in which Winnicott presents his arguments, to highlight the detective novel structure of the text, as if the author were hinting at a clue whose real importance will only become clear later.

Winnicott writes that the subject capable only of relating is an isolated subject who cannot see the other as real. He treats him as his own creation. But like a seasoned chess player, Winnicott makes a winning move and immediately connects the problem of the isolated subject to that of psychoanalysis, which is based on a psychology of the isolated subject (as opposed to a bipersonal or intersubjective psychology)—in the same way that in “Attacks on Linking” Bion connects the symptom triad of stupidity, arrogance, and curiosity of certain pseudoneurotic patients to that of the therapy and the discipline that should cure them. In fact, Winnicott writes,

If I am right in this, then it follows that discussion of the subject of relating is a much easier exercise for analysts than is the discussion of usage, since relating may be examined as a phenomenon of the subject, and psycho-analysis always likes to be able to eliminate all factors that are environmental, except in so far as the environment can be thought of in terms of projective mechanisms. But in examining usage there is no escape: the analyst must take into account the nature of the object, not as a projection, but as a thing in itself. (p. 221)

In short, Winnicott asserts that in the evolution of the therapeutic relationship, sometimes there is a hitch in the transition from relating to the object to using the object. What results is the iatrogenic situation described by Freud as interminable analysis.

This has all the appearance of a sharp critique of Kleinianism, which, according to various authors, elevates—but also paradoxically reduces—the fantasy life of internal objects to a sort of theology. According to them, while implying work in the here and now, the Kleinian technique ends up emptying the sense of the concrete experience lived by the patient in the encounter with the analyst. Winnicott is thus challenging the Kleinian theory of object relations and the apparently absolute dominance it assigns to the reality of the patient’s internal world.

It’s as if he were saying: it’s convenient for you to talk about phantasmatic relations, much less to concern yourselves with the real, true, effective qualities of the object. But the capacity to use the object is not given only by the child’s developmental stage; the real characteristics of the object itself also matter.

This sentence helps us understand what kind of “relations” Winnicott has in mind. They are primitive relations as represented in Klein’s theory—that is, existing from the beginning and regardless of the objective qualities of the environment.

A judo move: it is as if he used the opponent’s own momentum to unbalance them:

Since you speak of relations already present at birth, I will show you that it is a mistaken use. I do it by giving you the impression of adhering to your own principle—that already at the beginning of life there are in the infant relationship patterns structured as unconscious fantasies.

Evidently, what is at stake is the legitimacy, and indeed the necessity, of moving from a psychology of the isolated subject to a psychology of intersubjectivity. But then it becomes pressing to clarify better the difference between being capable of relating to the object and being capable of using it. To this end, Winnicott uses the model of the mother-infant relationship at birth. Ontogenesis is at play, but then the key factor to consider, he writes, is the transitional phenomena. And it is here, immediately after, that he speaks of “recognition.”

Winnicott writes that in the child’s life there are two phases. At first, the child is not truly separated from the object. For him, the object is only the bundle of his projections. Yet, unlike the Kleinian framework, these projections do not arise from a fully formed subject. On the contrary, they are the very medium through which subjectivity begins to emerge. The psyche is not projecting from a fixed center—it is taking shape through the act of projection itself, within a shared, relational field. What first appears is not a self in isolation, but a flicker of selfhood arising from intersubjective process—not a starting point, but a provisional outcome of an unfolding encounter. As D’Agostino (personal communication, 2025) says, “the object, at first, survives a ‘first bite’ delivered by a subject-who-does-not-yet-exist to an object-that-does-not-yet-exist (not yet an internal object of fantasy).” At the beginning, the object is not separate from the infant; it is a “subjective object”; it does not exist in itself; it is totally caught in the circle of infantile omnipotence. All the child can do is relate to the object. However, he has not yet developed the capacity to use it.

Here the first lexical problems emerge. If I had to formulate the same idea—that in the phase of relating the object is not recognized as separate—instinctively I would have said the opposite. I would have ventured that until there is an actual separation, the object is not a true and real object, independent, with its own desires, needs, emotions, and so forth; rather, it can only be “used,” just as we use concrete objects, more or less automatically, or even in the sense that sometimes one complains of having felt or feeling “used” or manipulated by another.

The immediate and spontaneous idea I have of the word “relating” is as a synonym for emotional connection or bond. Therefore, I would have said that by definition a relationship can be established only between two whole and separate subjects; that the child can relate to the object after the pivotal moment of recognition, not before.

Having set forth the central thesis and packaged it in the form of a riddle, before arriving at the final resolution, Winnicott guides the reader on a journey that includes challenging turns but shows breathtaking vistas and often arouses a sense of wonder and gratitude. At least, this was my experience—feeling gradually that the annoyance was diminishing, and as if I felt the author promising me that until the end I would not be left alone.

Usage

If we talk instead about “use (usage),” there is no longer the escape of erasing the responsibility of the object by taking refuge in the explanatory value of the concept of fantasy. The concept of use brings to mind that of a “tool,” a concrete doing as opposed to unconscious thinking; precisely, “a thing in itself” (p. 221), an entity that exists independently of the subject.

The etymology of “usage,” from the Latin usare, is illuminating (Pianigiani, 1907). An interesting derivation from “used” is “to frequent,” in the sense of “habitual.” The term thus relates to concepts that express not possession, like “to make use of,” a verb that recalls the idea of “dependence, of full discretion,” or “to employ,” which conveys that of “occupation, of exercise,” but being—that is, “ideas of habit, of frequency, of mode of operating, of enjoyment, of consumption of the thing . . . one uses a faculty.”

Not entirely dissimilar is the concept of “use” in philosophy. Suffice it to recall that Heidegger always refers to the spontaneous use we make of the tools that are part of our environment (Gebrauchsdingen), for example, the hammer, as a demonstration of the situatedness of the subject in the world, of the holistic foundation of meaning, and as an affirmation of a nonsolipsistic ontology of the subject.

In the English translation of Being and Time, there is a phrase that seems to have served as a template for Winnicott’s (1952/1958b) famous assertion that there is no such thing as a baby without the mother (“There is no such thing as a baby”; p. 99). Heidegger writes, “there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 97), or “There ‘is’ no such thing as a useful thing” (Heidegger, 1927/1996, p. 64).

But he means exactly the same thing. The individual is always immersed in the world. With the things that surround him, even before seeing them as objects in the environment, he entertains relations of use. Then, there is nothing that does not refer to other things—for example, a pen to paper, and so on. The concept of use or usability (Zuhandenheit) thus overlaps with that of relation. Furthermore, the examples Heidegger offers are of manufactured objects; there is therefore the idea that the ability to use them is not innate but must be learned, and that it can always be improved.

The word “use” also implies the idea of competence and experience. At the same time, it is a type of spontaneous knowledge, not thematized by the subject at the moment he makes use of an object; it arises from practical involvement. It is in this way that the thing reveals itself to him and becomes real. The usability of the object does not come after the abstract knowledge of the object but is one with it.

Winnicott (1969/2018i) writes,

we actually witness a mutuality which is the beginning of a communication between two people; this (in the baby) is a developmental achievement, one that is dependent on the baby’s inherited processes leading toward emotional growth and likewise dependent on the mother and her attitude and her capacity to make real what the baby is ready to reach out for, to discover, to create. (p. 255)

In the note, he specifies that he is referring to Sechehaye’s concept of “‘symbolic realization,’ which means enabling a real thing to become a meaningful symbol of mutuality in a specialized setting” (p. 255n).

Now, it’s not that Winnicott is unaware that he is polemicizing with the Kleinians (but also with Freud’s theory of aggressiveness as an emanation of the death drive or destructive drive, and with the concept of interchangeability of the drive’s object). He also knows that to effectively deliver his thrust, he is twisting the language. Perhaps he is allowing himself to use a refined sense of irony: those who talk so much about relations, having even inaugurated—hear, hear!—a “theory of (object) relations,” do not really know what they are talking about.

In this sense, revealing is the sentence that introduces the quote, where he (feigningly) apologizes for assuming a “prevaricating” attitude: “It is perhaps necessary to prevaricate a little longer to give my own view on the difference between object-relating and object-usage” (p. 220). Even if in this context the verb “to prevaricate” has the sense of deviating a bit from the main thread of the discourse, and not of abusing or taking advantage of someone, nonetheless the text also evokes that nuance. Among other things, it is the accusation that has always been directed at the Kleinian phalanx, at least the first historical nucleus—that is, of being militarized, dogmatic, and thus tendentially “overbearing.” ⁶ A way of saying: I repay you in kind.

Destruction as the Unconscious Underpinning of Love for a Real Object

But we are just beginning to familiarize ourselves with the distinction between object-relating and object-using when a second plot twist occurs. The concept of “destruction” appears for the first time. To move from the first mode of relating to the second (from relating to usage), in unconscious fantasy, the child must destroy the object (“the subject destroys the object”; p. 223). What could it possibly mean that the child “destroys” the object? Destroying brings to mind a violent act with a practical, material expression. That is to say, we are well beyond hate as a mere feeling. Hate may be present but does not necessarily turn into violent action. Instead, it’s difficult to retain a virtual character for the term “destruction”; nor, in a similar context, does it make sense to use it metaphorically—as one might.

But here, saying “destruction” serves to name something that happens before the appearance of hate. Strictly speaking, it wouldn’t even be correct, as Winnicott later does, to argue that it expresses love. Logically, the child couldn’t feel any emotion, not yet being a subject. When Winnicott writes that destruction is a form of primary love, the adjective cancels out the noun it refers to; or then, we must understand it as a sort of precursor or preconception of what will later be called that.

For a while, I tried to find some refuge from the anxiety of not understanding in some hypotheses. Perhaps, I thought, Winnicott is merely faithful to his rhetorical styles, wanting to exaggerate the tones, make them a bit dramatic, so to speak, épater les bourgeois, just as when he lists all the reasons mothers have to hate their children or emphasizes the role of hate in countertransference; thus, he uses the word “destruction” in a “metonymic” sense, to allude to that amount of “destruction” that in fact occurs in the mother who raises a small child—a sense of physical and spiritual exhaustion, just like when one says, “I am destroyed, worn out”; it may be that he wants to look at the child’s absolute hate for the object, which Klein has already discussed, and perhaps rival her, addressing affective ambivalence with an even more powerful lens to show what it’s made of.

Freud’s Destruction

To find some reference points in psychoanalytic literature, we must return to Freud for the role he assigns to the word “destruction” and the link he already posits between destruction and love. For Freud (1915/1957), “At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical” (p. 136) and in humans, the death drive is active from birth. This “inborn human inclination to ‘badness,’ to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well” (Freud, 1930/1961a, p. 120), the “destructive drive” (Destruktionstrieb), also called “the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power” (Freud, 1924/1961b, p. 163), is at the disposal of Eros for the discharge of excitation, even though it remains mysterious how this can happen: “We are without any physiological understanding of the ways and means by which this taming of the death-instinct by the libido may be effected” (Freud, 1924/1961b, p. 164).

Even outside of sexuality, for Freud (1929), the satisfaction of the destructive drive, death drive, or aggressiveness as “the inclination to aggression [that] is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man . . . man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each” (p. 122) provides the individual with “an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence. . . . the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature” (p. 121).

Freud asserts that the two fundamental drives can oppose or combine, cooperate or conflict. Thus, he writes, that “The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness—a desire to subjugate” (Freud, 1905/1953, p. 157), and that “the act of eating is a destruction of the object with the final aim of incorporating it and the sexual act is an aggression having as its purpose the most intimate union” (Freud, 1938/1964b, p. 149). To the destructive drive or the death drive, Freud also assigns the task of preserving the individual and contributing to his differentiation:

So long as that instinct operates internally, as a death instinct, it remains silent; we only come across it after it has become diverted outwards as an instinct of destruction. That that diversion should occur seems essential for the preservation of the individual; the musculature is employed for the purpose. (Freud, 1938/1964b, p. 150)

Finally, Freud (1925/1961c) bases negation on the destructive drive, that is, the ability to say “no,” which is essential for the development of symbolic activity or “function of judgement” (p. 239) and to allow “thought a first level of independence.” As he writes, “Affirmation—as a substitute for uniting—belongs to Eros; negation—the successor to expulsion—belongs to the instinct of destruction” (p. 239).

As we can see, Freud already links a concept of destruction to the dialectic of identity and difference on which the development of a human capacity to create meaning is based. Furthermore, he presents the highest and noblest levels of thought as the natural extension of a dynamic that is inherent not only at the linguistic-symbolic level of the psyche or the nonverbal or bodily level but also significantly at the level of matter. Thus, with a bold and brilliant intuition, he can assert that “The analogy of our two fundamental instincts is carried over from the region of animate things to the pair of opposing forces—attraction and repulsion—which rule in the inorganic world” (Freud, 1938/1964b, p. 149).

We can conclude that on the subject of destruction, Freud already provides all the characters to tell the story of the birth of the psyche, and that Winnicott takes them up but changes the plot of the story. For him, destructiveness does not arise unilaterally either from the death drive or from the frustration caused by friction with reality; instead, it arises from the child’s need to have at his disposal a real and true object—milk, nourishment. This means that the emphasis shifts from the drive to meaning. The instinctive tendency remains, in any case, to circumvent frustration, but where Freud is hypnotized by the demonic force of the drive, Winnicott is by the indomitable immensity of the reality that opposes it. The object that resists the child’s attempt to destroy it is the same that teaches him, in turn, to tolerate frustration over its absence.

I repeat, talking about destruction suggests that there is hate, but there isn’t yet, just as there cannot be love. In fact, there isn’t yet a subject—perhaps for Klein but certainly not for Winnicott. Nor can we speak of true aggressiveness, if seen as an expression of hate, in the spontaneous movements of the child. Although already at birth endowed with rich capacities for interaction with the object, the child does not “hate” anyone and does not “wish” to attack anyone. The child doesn’t know what he is doing; he reacts to stimuli, moves, kicks, scratches, bites, and simply asserts himself, his own vitality.

The definition of this primary motility as involuntary communicative expression and “muscular erotism,” that is, the meaning it can have as “the infant’s change from being merged with the mother to being separate from her, or to relating to her as separate and ‘not-me’” (Winnicott, 1965b, p. 45), can only come indirectly. It is the only way through which destruction as an instinctual impulse begins to be tinged with true aggressiveness and true hate; that is, it transforms into something psychic—only by entering the circuit of reflexivity. It is only in the nonverbal and verbal mirroring by the object that this motility begins to be alphabetized and experienced by the child as feelings of real hate and aggressiveness, with a growing sense of responsibility. In fact, not the child, but only the mother, as a member and spokesperson of the symbolic community, is in a position to immediately interpret mere instinctual expressions as affects.

To recap: there is an innate destructive impulse (or drive) that is simply “spontaneity.” To this is added only secondarily—but, if we disregard a useful but abstract distinction, in fact immediately—a reactive aggressiveness to the frustration encountered in the environment that resists destruction. In favorable cases, observes Winnicott, “there is no destruction, or not much” (p. 245). As the object becomes real, the child becomes aware of the fantasy of destruction, which also activates a corresponding fantasy and activity of reparation. The distinction into two moments is significant but also purely theoretical and not practical.

Regarding what is the most suitable word to designate the instinctual and innate impulse of the child to treat the object in a certain way, Winnicott notes that “perhaps we have not yet found the right word” to name what he has so far designated as “destruction.” He then proposes as a possible synonym “provocation,” something he reiterates shortly after with the expression “provocative (or aggressive or destructive) impulse [here not ‘drive’]” (p. 245). And again, a few lines later Winnicott, 1969/2018e, (p. 246), he concedes that it may also have to do with what the Kleinians call envy:

This provocative destructive aggressive envious (Klein) urge is not a pleasure-pain principle phenomenon. It has nothing to do with anger at the inevitable frustrations associated with the reality principle. It precedes this set of phenomena that are true of neurotics but that are not true of psychotics. (p. 246).

But he completely changes the meaning of this concept. No longer an innate factor that leads the patient to attack the analyst because of all the good things he has to offer—which, strictly speaking, should arouse gratitude and not envy—but rather a reaction induced by the environment. The agent that transforms destruction into envy is only the object that does not survive—the two terms are then to be understood as opposing concepts.

For Winnicott, at the beginning of life, there is no envy. The child’s developmental level is not yet so sophisticated. If anything, envy appears only as a consequence of the mother’s failure to adapt to his needs. In this sense, already in an essay written a decade earlier, he finds useful the descriptive concept of oral sadism, in that it “is valuable as a concept because it joins up with the biological concept of hunger, a drive to object-relationships that comes from primitive sources, and that holds sway at least from the time of birth” (Winnicott, 1959/2018l, p. 446), but not, as the Kleinians say, the metapsychological one of “oral-sadistic envy.” We grasp that

Here we have the paradox of a good breast that is a persecutor, a thing that must be destroyed. Thus aggression appears, directed towards the good object, but this aggression is reactive and is not the aggression of the primitive love impulse which represents an achievement, a fusion of muscular erotism and the sensory orgy of the erotogenic zones . . . primitive loving with eating. (p. 454)

Again, Winnicott speaks of destruction because, for him, it cannot yet be hate. At degree zero, destruction is the very existence of the child, his vitality; and if we speak of projections, at the beginning of life we must understand them not as unconscious fantasy but as physical action, materiality of movements, concreteness of vital functions. For the child, before a true representational activity is established, to destroy is to affirm his mere natural existence. Quoting Empedocles, Winnicott uses the amusing image of the dragon and the fire: “Who can say whether in essence fire is constructive or destructive?” (p. 239). And he equates this fire with the physiological activity of the infant’s “first and subsequent breaths, out-breathing” (p. 239).

The thesis could not be clearer: “In this vitally important early stage the ‘destructive’ (fire-air or other) aliveness of the individual is simply a symptom of being alive, and has nothing to do with an individual’s anger at the frustrations that belong to meeting the reality principle” (p. 239). The idea is that the sum of the actions that the child spontaneously performs to avoid foundering in the sea of reality and autopoietically constructs the “vortex” of the self that differentiates within a medium in which he continues to be immersed, and that in the same movement also constructs the not-me. The vortex is realized only thanks to the resistance that the medium opposes (Civitarese, 2016/2018).

Surviving: “Milk Yes, Breast No!”

We have begun to see the meaning of destruction, but the pivotal point of the text is where the concept of love makes its appearance. It happens in a surprising way. Winnicott gives voice to the child and has him express an unequivocal and paradoxical equation that I would summarize with the formula “love is a function of destruction”—just as, for Bion, thought is a function of the tolerated absence of the object. But let’s take a step back and return to the beginning of the paragraph.

Winnicott knows he is asking a lot from the reader. For this reason, he resorts to a rhetorical trick. He sets up a mock debate with a critical character called “an armchair philosopher” (p. 222) who, he imagines, might be lurking in the reader. In this way, he disarms any merely rationalistic temptation to grasp the paradoxical sense of his discourse. He calls the reader—“armchair philosopher”—to the evidence of direct observation. He asks him to do just one thing: to get up and sit on the floor with the child.

Then, he would immediately understand that the child’s “near absolute” dependence (Winnicott, 1969/2018i, p. 252) on the object manifests itself with a greed that, if not contained, would end up destroying it. If the object does not allow itself to be consumed, thanks to this resistance it begins to “contrast” the child’s profile, as a portrait artist would, bringing him into relief; in short, it brings him into existence. It is then that the object exits (gradually and never completely) from the sphere of the child’s omnipotence. But the child also exits from the sphere of the mother’s omnipotence.

Together with the object, the child begins to stand out against a previously indistinct background, like a drawing whose first outlines are glimpsed, or like a bas-relief that stands out more and more as the sculptor removes (“destroys”) the surrounding material that hid it. The key factor for destruction to be creative and successful is to properly dose the force employed. The pencil must press on the canvas but without piercing it; the chisel must remove material but not that which is necessary to delineate the figure.

It is therefore important that the object allows itself to be tyrannized in part. Thus, it comes to know how much it means to the child, like the beloved to a jealous lover, and translates the instinctive physical impulse into a feeling. However, it is important that the object is also capable of surviving the (total) destruction, of containing it, and not retaliating (revenge would destroy for both the possibility of feeling real).

The object’s ability to survive is equivalent to the mother’s capacity for rêverie according to Bion. ⁷ If a mother rejects the child’s projective identifications, which then return to him as nameless terror, it means she has not managed to absorb anxiety, anger, and other emotions. The ability to survive then means the ability to accept what presents itself as potentially destructive—and which in certain cases really becomes so (e.g., inducing apathy, exhaustion, depression)—but without being upset, allowing it to dwell within herself for a while before returning it in a modified form; consequently, having destroyed what needed to be destroyed and simultaneously accepting in turn to be changed.

While Bion uses a more abstract language, Winnicott envisions images of the child who plays at harassing the mother in all possible ways (but also gratifying her), a behavior that is part of his normal development. Any content that penetrates her takes the place of something else and, in any case, alters (destroys) the preexisting arrangement.

Without the experience of destroying an object that survives him and does not retaliate, the subject “becomes ‘part’ of an omnipresent, devouring ‘all’ ‘me’ suckling on myself” (Nancy, 2006/2013, p. 50); he is condemned to a sort of perpetual autophagy. In analysis, it is the scenario of a state of sterile immobility. Such a subject does not feed on milk that flows from the breast, “can feed only on the self” (p. 225).

In reality, what can we imagine happens? A mother who does not impose limits leaves the child at the mercy of Difference (with a capital D, in this case to indicate that it is not assimilable), that is, of a reality little or not at all mitigated. Beyond the intentions of the object, the “milk” would soon run out, and only the pathological possibility of rumination would remain (Gaddini, 1959/1989). Here, too, we see the usefulness of reversing the perspective and the need to reason in terms of system or field: the mother who survives destruction is the mother who not only sets limits for the child but also sets limits for herself.

Moreover, we realize that the function of both the individual and the community is to modulate the difference that impacts the child at birth—with Winnicott (1949/2017), to present the world to him “in small doses.” If there were no mother to tell the child “Milk yes, breast no!” thus simultaneously offering him the experience of both gratification (identity) and frustration (difference), the excess of difference would overwhelm him. In this, however, Winnicott shows that even if there were an excess of identity, as in a sort of adhesive identification, the possibility for the subject to grow would be limited. In short, a certain degree of destruction would occur but this time concretely “destructive” of the subject.

Destruction becomes proof of the object’s existence because (in part) it fails; or, put differently, because in part it succeeds. If I make myself available to meet you at four in the afternoon, it means I am not available at three or five. The virtually infinite series of meetings foreseen by the subject’s unlimited creativity identifies a realization and suddenly inscribes it in the register of the finite. But even the object could never be found if the subject did not have a preconception of it and, in this sense, if he did not invent it. The object also creates the subject, that is, its own object. The process is reciprocal: just as the child creates the mother and the mother allows herself to be found, so the mother creates the child and the child allows himself to be found.

In conclusion, if for mother and child the relating is the canvas or raw marble of the instinctual relationship that still needs to be worked on (Nature), the term “use” lends itself perfectly to indicating that the mature relationship is something that must be learned (Culture). In other words, destruction becomes the background of love if the mother manages to see it as such, but also if the child is healthy enough and receptive to what he receives—nothing makes sense outside the context (Derrida, 1967/1997, p. 158: “There is nothing outside of the text”). The child can then pronounce the astonishing: “ ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’ ‘While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’ ” (p. 222). But also: “You have value for me only because the risk of destruction persists,” in that the subject never stops being born for the object and vice versa. Again, it is a mutual destruction that equates to drawing or sculpting each other, a process that lasts a lifetime for each of us.

Except for the expression we have just mentioned, this is the first of only two times in UO that Winnicott uses the verb “to love” or the word “love,” the second being shortly after when he interprets “the backcloth of unconscious destruction” as the factor that reinforces the love reward for a real object that the analyst receives for having survived negative transference movements. As we can see, Winnicott weaves it closely with the concepts of destruction and recognition. Not by chance, in the last line of the paragraph where he establishes the equivalence destruction ≡ love, we read the word “recognition.”

All right, we have the impression of orienting ourselves a bit better: only if the object survives destruction can it be used and loved. But having followed Winnicott’s discourse this far, can we say we have fully understood it? I wouldn’t say so; it is still not entirely clear to me what he really means by “destruction.”

Reciprocity of Destruction

Finally, upon reaching the penultimate page of the article, Winnicott explains what he means by destruction, and it’s another acrobatic leap because he reverses the direction along which it occurs. No longer is it the child destroying the mother but the mother destroying the child! This helps us take a step forward to formulate the idea of an essential reciprocity of the process (although not yet its actuality, which we will see shortly).

Although destruction is the word I am using, this actual destruction belongs to the object’s failure to survive. Without this failure, destruction remains potential. The word “destruction” is needed, not because of the baby’s impulse to destroy, but because of the object’s liability not to survive, which also means to suffer change in quality, in attitude. (p. 225, italics added)

It’s as if he’s saying: using the term “destruction” serves to express a concept that works in the negative and to highlight the risk of actual destruction. It’s another way of placing the burden of recognition on the real object or environment, and not just on the phantasmatic one. In other words, through the strange little word “use,” to oppose one type of relationship to another.

For Winnicott, the word destruction doesn’t really refer to what the child “does”; it doesn’t originate from him. The child has no choice; he’s simply driven by the innate impulse to suck more milk and “incorporate” more breast, that is, to perpetuate a state of bliss given by instinctual gratification. The real destruction pertains to the potential incapacity of the object to survive—to extricate itself from the area of the child’s omnipotence. Only then does destruction become “real” instead of “potential,” and in the end, it’s the child, due to his fragility, who comes out worse.

For Winnicott, “destruction” is a concept that concerns the mother more than the child. True destruction occurs only if the mother fails. We witness a complete reversal of roles. It’s the failure of the object—in general, the mother—to contain his impulses and anxieties that sours into actual destruction the love that the child can only express through manifestations of his innate vitality.

At this point, what we really see destroyed are the concepts of the death drive, aggressiveness, or primary envy viewed as a kind of unamendable original sin. Instead, destruction is like the shadow generated by light, the dark and ever-immanent side of love. Like the shadow, a certain tolerable “destruction” can bring relief. This is expressed by Winnicott’s (1951/1958c) other famous concept of the “good enough mother” (p. 237).

Bion (1962b) asserts that the mother loves the child with her capacity for rêverie. This capacity shares the same background of creative destruction of primary love that Winnicott discusses. Striving to give the child a certain shape inevitably involves exercising a certain violence. The mother implicitly denies everything she cannot imagine through her capacity for rêverie. She dreams of the child who will grow up and surpass her in everything, but also what he will be and do an instant later.

In short, every growth implies a certain amount of destruction. Just as it’s in the very nature of a concept—which can develop through abstraction, that is, by eliminating real elements specific to objects belonging to the same class—so a certain amount of destruction is the prerequisite for any transformation.

That said, it’s essential to retain the sense of oscillation—that the mother “destroys” the child in her own way, just as the child “destroys” the mother in his own way But let’s also remember that, although in different ways, the mother contains her child while the child contains his mother (Civitarese, 2022).

This covers reciprocity. And what about actuality? In what sense is it possible to say that destruction must be not only reciprocal but also real? And what reality are we talking about?

Effectuality of Destruction

First of all, let’s observe that while in Freud and Klein destruction remains mostly on the abstract plane of metapsychology, in Winnicott it becomes palpable. We see it, feel it, smell it, touch it. Winnicott vividly portrays the scenario of a mother who endures being treated poorly or manipulated by the child—and by analogy, the analyst by the patient—in some way without appealing to her own rights. Moreover, if the mother can tolerate being hated, it is because she operates within the perimeter of primary maternal preoccupation (Winnicott, 1956/1958d), that is, a dedication and love that can contain even the child’s impulses to destroy her.

Then, one cannot help but recall the 17 reasons listed in “Hate in the Countertransference” (Winnicott, 1949/1958e) that any mother would have for hating the child for all the things he does to her. Furthermore, Winnicott explains that the child comes to feel love as such only when he feels touched by the (unacted but) concrete hate of the object—where it is evident that “hate” is synonymous with destruction, albeit at a more evolutionarily sophisticated level.

All this represents a first (visible) level of the effectuality of destruction. But there is another equally important (invisible) one for the process of symbolization and therefore of subjectivation.

For the object, surviving also means surviving as a no-thing or no-breast (Bion, 1965), that is, as a trace engraved in the child’s memory. It is at that moment that the third, intermediate dimension of experience described by Winnicott as the transitional space is generated—that is, the paradox of a space that is both real and virtual, Self and not-Self, belonging to both the child and the mother. It is then that the fantasy of destruction is both real and potential, that is, real in fantasy. The part of the fantasy that is forbidden (corresponding to the concrete destruction of the breast) remains “potential” or virtual in the internal world—but this is nothing other than another type of reality, and moreover, no less “physical.” At the same time, the part of the fantasy that is accepted and enacted (the destruction of the milk)—where, mind you, both “milk” and “breast” here are to be understood not only as concrete objects but in their symbolic meaning—is instead effective and concrete.

What happens in the transition from the first to the second type of effectuality?

First of all, thanks to negotiation with the object, from being essentially corporeal, the fantasy gradually also becomes psychic. Secondly, any object comes to be configured as composed of a subjective side and an objective side. In Winnicott’s language, the subjective object becomes the objective object . . . but it never ceases to also be subjective.

So, could it be that Winnicott’s use of the word “destruction,” with the aura of materiality that characterizes it, and despite his insistence on qualifying it as a fantasy, is precisely due to the intent to underline its absolutely corporeal or concrete aspect—that is, effectual—albeit to a variable extent? Let’s reread what he writes: “the first drive is itself one thing, something that I call ‘destruction,’ but I could have called it a combined love-strife drive. . . . If the former, then there is no destruction, or not much [italics added]” (p. 245). As Winnicott (1969/2018i, p. 258) clarifies in his work on mutuality, which is shortly after UO, what is in the foreground is not the instinctual aspect but the nonverbal communication between mother and child, “the crude evidences of life, such as the heartbeat, breathing movements, breath warmth, movements that indicate a need for change of position, etc.”

However, the matter remains somewhat ambiguous. Apart from the enlightening note on “not much,” it is also true that what, in my opinion, we do not find in Winnicott—caught in the trap of having to decide whether destruction remains virtual or becomes real (when the object does not survive)—is that there must be a partial destruction—coinciding with the mechanism of negation that, in the language of psychoanalysis, we would call reciprocal projective identification, or rather projective-introjective (Civitarese, 2025b).

If we conceive of intersubjective life merely as a “play of intrapsychic fantasies,” we risk flattening it into an abstract, disembodied construct. Yet from a psychoanalytic and phenomenological perspective, fantasies are not confined to the mind—they take shape in the body, manifesting through attitudes, gestures, postures, and the subtle choreography of relational exchange: words and silences, nearness and withdrawal.

Relationship, then, is not simply the encounter between two isolated psyches, but a living matrix of mutual influence, a field of intercorporeal responsiveness. The other is not only imagined or fantasized: they are seen, touched, heard, smelled; and they respond in turn. Each subject becomes, in a sense, malleable in the hands of the other—shaped by traces of affect, tension, and the rhythms of interaction. This ongoing sculpting of the self by the other unfolds in a dynamic that is neither strictly reciprocal nor entirely one-directional, but layered and evolving.

What we call “fantasy” is not a sealed interior scene, but the very texture of the relational space—enacted and registered in the body. It is not a mental game, but an affective and physical process in which fantasies, desires, fears, and projections circulate, often below awareness. In this concrete dialectic, both partners are transformed: your response alters my affective position, mine reshapes yours, in a continuous interplay of adaptation and resonance.

Winnicott’s claim that the child “destroys” the object in fantasy does not refer to an abstract inner event, but to something deeply real in the intersubjective field. The destruction is played out through affective storms, ruptures, provocations—modes of testing that leave their mark. The mother is not literally attacked (if by “attack” we mean an intentional act, since at the beginning of life, again, we cannot presuppose an already established ego), but she endures the emotional force of the child’s projection. Her survival is not imagined, but lived—demonstrated through presence, nonretaliation, and resilience. Only when the object withstands this trial can it emerge as real in the child’s experience.

The analytic setting reprises this drama. The patient, often unconsciously, tests the analyst’s capacity to hold the field through emotional intensities—attacks, retreats, seductions. If the analyst survives without collapsing or retaliating, they become real to the patient. Recognition, in this light, is not a declarative act but an emergent process of mutual transformation.

Destruction, then, is not pathology—it is the necessary test through which the other becomes real and differentiated. Without it, the object remains caught in omnipotent fantasy.

Destruction, Recognition, Love

Having isolated in UO these three key words, of which only the first (destruction) is in clear evidence, while the second (recognition) recurs only once, and the third (love) only twice (at least in the inaugural article), we now have the task of trying to articulate them into a coherent whole. The question is: is there a secret matrix or equation that unites the factors “not-much-destruction,” “recognition,” and “love”? My answer is affirmative. We find it practically ready-made in Hegel’s theory of love, first in his early theological writings and later in the Phenomenology (Hegel, 1807/1977). ⁸

We do not know how much and in what way Winnicott was aware of it. It is just a supposition, ⁹ but it is highly unlikely that, directly or indirectly, he had not absorbed it in some way, although he never cites the author and is rather suspicious of philosophy. But turning the tables, I would use with him his own device of the armchair philosopher. I would invite Winnicott to hear what he has to say and see if he still seems so unaware of theories of recognition and what the essence of human subjectivity is.

That Hegel’s dialectic of recognition can be expressed in the terms used by Winnicott in UO seems to me an obviousness that it is time to acknowledge. ¹⁰ The concepts of destruction and survival of the object translate exactly those that are articulated in the crucial concept of Aufhebung, that is, of negation (removal, lifting) that elevates and preserves, precisely because each “I” is grafted into the other and promotes its growth.

Hegel, in his master-slave dialectic, articulates a strikingly parallel logic. Recognition is not offered in theory—it must be wrested through existential confrontation. Each consciousness must risk itself, facing the other not as fantasy but as an autonomous force capable of resistance or affirmation. Only through this ordeal does genuine recognition arise.

As Williams (1997) writes, the concept of love in Hegel is a technical concept, at the same time a speculative ontological principle and a dialectical account of intersubjectivity. ¹¹ On it, he bases the theory of recognition and spirit. Love is the event that unites opposites but leaves them at the same time in their individuality. What is realized is a partial coalescence (growth) of subject and object.

There is a phrase of Hegel’s that is particularly striking, as it resonates with Winnicott’s lexicon:

True union, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another’s eyes living beings from every point of view; . . . This genuine love excludes all oppositions. It is not the understanding, whose relations always leave the manifold of related terms as a manifold and whose unity is always a unity of opposites [left as opposites]. It is not reason either, because reason sharply opposes its determining power to what is determined. Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a feeling, yet not a single feeling [among other single feelings]. . . . finally, love completely destroys objectivity and thereby annuls and transcends reflection, deprives man’s opposite of all foreign character, and discovers life itself without any further defect. In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life [in the subject] senses life [in the object]. (Hegel, 1948, pp. 304-305, italics added)

In Williams’s reading, this means that when speaking of the “destruction of objectivity” in the context of love, it does not mean the cancellation of the other individual. Rather, the dynamics that imply distancing, separation, and alienation between the lover and the object of love are suspended. This “destruction” represents an overcoming of the tendency to objectify, dominate, and generate enmity. Love renounces force and domination, focusing attention on the loved object. The destruction of the object is then only the destruction of its character of foreignness. What is “destroyed” is the other as other-than-Self, as not-Self. The destroyed other thus becomes part of oneself.

The reference to the concept of love—an emotion, feeling or sentiment that by definition no one can control intentionally—is for both Hegel and Winnicott a way of saying that the challenge of recognition is played out to a significant extent on the unconscious plane of a process of mutual “destruction” or alienation, and above all that it involves affectivity. Ultimately, the dialectic of destruction/survival becomes a way of describing how processes of mutual identification can take place—how one can become (partially) identical while remaining different at the same time.

If they had not used the word “love,” neither “destruction” nor “recognition” in themselves could indicate these two essential elements of the process by which one moves from relating to usage. Conversely, without the word “destruction” we would not know that at the heart of this dynamic lies a struggle, and that there is always the risk that it becomes excessive and ruinous. Instead, without the word “recognition” we would not know that although it is not guaranteed that the struggle will be successful for both, nevertheless it is the only way for the subject to come into existence. The crucial principle is that of mutuality. I can be recognized (“loved”) as a human being only by someone I invest with this power and whom I therefore in turn recognize (“love”) as a human being. A further aspect is to emphasize that any authentic bond has the same structure, if not invariably the high intensity, as that apparent in romantic love.

Hegel (1948) expresses this concept brilliantly, and in more concrete terms, by quoting Shakespeare

The lover who takes is not thereby made richer than the other; he is enriched indeed, but only so much as the other is. So too the giver does not make himself poorer; by giving to the other he has at the same time and to the same extent enhanced his own treasure (compare Juliet in Romeo and Juliet [ii.1.175–177]: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love is as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have”). (p. 307)

For Hegel, when the subject expresses his desire for the other—which implies a certain destruction of the other—he is also destroying his own independence, because he admits to depending on the other. But if the destruction of the other were to take effect without involving the acceptance of a certain destruction of oneself, corresponding to the other’s desire toward oneself, his would be only an empty, purely material independence within a relationship of imposition. He would be recognized not as a subject worthy of destruction inasmuch as he is desirable and lovable, but only on the purely abstract plane as the strongest, provided he does not fall victim to the strength of others. It is the essence of the master-slave relationship seen as the failure of recognition.

But meanwhile, we see that recognition can be carried out on two levels: abstract/cognitive or so to speak “face-to-face,” and affective/corporeal or “skin-to-skin.” The first corresponds to the reasons of Creon, linked to the law; the second to the reasons of Antigone, linked to blood and family ties. Both are necessary, but the problem is that they can be split from each other (Civitarese, 2022/2024).

Without the recognition of the other, no one could ever be authentically free and autonomous. The paradox is that only in the bond with the other can I find my freedom. It is equally obvious that for the other to recognize me, he must in turn be recognized by me; otherwise, he would not have the capacity.

Self and other both emerge from the failure of (total) destruction and from the success of a certain amount (“not much”) of reciprocal destruction. It is well understood that destruction is the dialectical movement that affirms by negating or negates by affirming.

Still from the Hegelian perspective, destruction according to Winnicott is only prehuman desire (Begierde), self-centered and narcissistic appetite, craving to possess and consume what can satisfy it, a form of natural egoism or solipsism—Bion would say a kind of “tropism.” For this type of desire, to become human means for the subject to increasingly redirect themselves toward the desire of the other—that is, to gradually transform into a desire for love and recognition.

The dialectic of recognition as that which simultaneously produces more subjectivity and more intersubjectivity—that is, at the same time, more autonomy and more fusion, just as Hegel describes in love—can also be seen at work in Winnicott’s distinction between mother-object and mother-environment. Winnicott breaks down the child’s relationship with the mother into two different aspects. Essentially, the first satisfies the needs of the Id, the second those of the Ego. For us, it is interesting how, with the concept of mother-environment, he refers to a state of “fusion” between mother and child. The mother-environment is “part of the total environment” (Winnicott, 1963/1965, p. 75). She is the mother who supports, protects, provides stability. It is this mother who receives everything that can be called “as affection and sensuous co-existence” (p. 75). The object must perform two different functions: as mother-environment, she must remain alive and available; as mother-object, she must not only live but also survive destruction.

Let’s read carefully this sentence by Winnicott (1963/1965):

human beings cannot accept the destructive aim in their very early loving attempts. The idea of destruction of the object-mother in loving can be tolerated, however, if the individual who is getting towards it has evidence of a constructive aim already at hand, and of an environment-mother ready to accept. (p. 80)

It is extraordinarily similar to Hegel’s assertion that destruction creates the subject. The destruction directed at the noisy mother-object brings forth from the chrysalis the silent mother-environment.

Thus, if we take the expression “Hello object!” it could be the slave addressing the master and vice versa, Antigone to Creon, and Rameau to Bertin, in Hegel’s interpretation in the Phenomenology, if they had not all failed in mutually recognizing (or existing) and if they had not all closed themselves in a shell of arrogance (Civitarese, 2021c, 2022/2024). At its zero degree, as we have seen, we can see Winnicott’s myth of destruction as the positive transposition of Hegel’s myth of the master-slave dialectic. Both are stories about how the psyche is born. Both have an unvarnished conception of this process. Reading one through the lens of the other allows us to gain an understanding of both that we would not otherwise achieve, and this understanding can serve as the basis for a psychoanalytic conception of the nature of human subjectivity, psychic pathology, and therapeutic action.

But there remains a key point, which I think is not sufficiently highlighted either by Winnicott (who insists that destruction remains confined to fantasy—as if it had no effectuality) or by various commentators, and that is that there must be a certain “destruction,” and it must be reciprocal. Said differently, fetal kicks must strike the walls of the uterus, and these must offer elastic resistance to them. If for the child it is important to acquire the capacity to use the object, what he must manage to do is to pass through recognition. The passage implies partially destroying the object as well as partially allowing oneself to be destroyed—“it is recognition of one put-out-of-itself by one put-out-of-itself—consequently, a recognition that is not one, that is not of the “one” by the “other,” and that therefore is also not the thought of the one about the other, but the alteration of each one,” as Nancy (1997/2002, p. 59) says in the fragment cited at the beginning. The survival of the object should itself be seen as an expression of the desire to maintain difference and to destroy the child, but which in favorable cases finds only a partial and necessary expression. Thanks to the filter of Hegel’s lesson, on this there can be no more doubts.

The essential aspect to grasp is that anything becomes real only when it is shared, and that sharing can only be the product of a certain destruction as mutual and effectual alteration of self; but that at the same time this mutual destruction is also “a mutual feeding situation . . . the beginning of a communication between two people . . . [a relationship of] mutuality that results from cross-identifications” (Winnicott, 1969/2018i, p. 255). Only in this way can bonds be forged, bridges built, establishing the common-in-between that we theorize as the area of intersubjectivity (not mere interaction!). The reality of an entity is a measure of the reciprocal processes of incorporation (the same theorized by the concept of projective identification) that result in the creation of the common-to-both—even while difference persists, like water flowing between the two different banks of a river. What we designate as “real” belongs by right to the realm of “we,” of seeing-with.

In fact, what I seek here is a rereading of Winnicott that can ground a psychoanalytic approach fully attuned to the embodied, intersubjective texture of psychic life. An approach that, after engaging Hegel’s theory of recognition, finds its natural continuation in Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intercorporeality. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) introduces a second layer of theoretical inevitability—alongside the practical reality of mutual destruction and Hegel’s dialectical logic—by asserting that subjectivity is not enclosed within the mind but is rooted in the living, expressive body—le corps propre—which is at once expressive and receptive. The body does not merely represent experience; it is experience.

Seen from this perspective, Winnicott’s notion of the child’s destructive fantasy is no longer just an internal drama, but a bodily address—a reaching toward the other that tests, touches, and reshapes. Likewise, the mother’s survival is not a matter of mental endurance alone, but a sustained presence that is seen, heard, and felt within a shared field of affect and gesture.

Who Can Say Whether, in Its Essence, Fire Is Constructive or Destructive?

Let us remember that at the beginning Winnicott had posed a specific clinical problem. In the last paragraph, providing yet another explanation (but it will not be the definitive one) of his use of the word “use,” he returns to it and introduces the reader to the final unveiling of the essay’s meaning: “I wish to conclude with a note on using and usage. By “use” I do not mean “exploitation.” As analysts, we know what it is like to be used, which means that we can see the end of the treatment, be it several years away [italics added]” (p. 226). It is a definition based on a double negation: with respect to destruction, he denies that it is real; with respect to use, he denies that it is manipulation.

Does seeing the end of the treatment stand for separation? For the analyst, finally allowing oneself to be dismissed by the patient? We always return to this point: for parents, accepting being “killed” by their children is a form of love toward them. Even the “crime” of killing one’s parents does not contradict love but affirms it in the deepest way, implying the positive outcome of a long and difficult process of identification (Loewald, 1979). At the same time, for parents (and for the analyst), surviving without being destroyed by the depression caused by being “killed” by their children and realizing that they no longer need them represents the greatest achievement they can aspire to in their lives.

Not by chance are the final words of the text “interminable analysis.” In the context of the discourse just made, it also stands for an “interminable” relationship between lovers or between parents and children—that is, immature, unresolved, as it avoids the work of mourning for the passage of time. The placement is not insignificant. Here it is, finally, the purloined letter! It suddenly seemed to me that I grasped the meaning of the entire article. Winnicott addresses the reader and says: there is a crime that analysts continue to perpetrate—and which is therefore no longer the violence he inflicts on ordinary lexicon. It is called interminable analysis, as if it could be a form of life, but it cannot be, as if a child and mother remained in a situation of relating, without ever having access to the reciprocal capacity to “use” each other.

The motive of the misdeed called interminable analysis is to reassure oneself about one’s own value thanks to the patient’s gratitude. But this gratitude is false; it is obtained only at the price of maintaining a certain split between the neurotic part and the psychotic part of the personality, which is something that does not properly go in the direction of cure. The whole thing also smacks a bit of sentimentality, an attitude that Winnicott generally stigmatizes.

The fault of the analyst who does not manage to conclude the analysis, or of the parent who abandons the children or stifles their creativity, is not having a clear distinction between the capacity to relate to the object and the capacity to use the object. The patient can reach this capacity only by partially destroying the analyst and then realizing that he has not (entirely) managed to destroy him (concretely). Winnicott tells us: now that you have this distinction clear, you can no longer get away with it; as we know, ignorance of the law excuses no one. We now intuit that Winnicott uses the word usage to describe the mature way of relating to the object because it inherently incorporates the concept of destruction. An inevitable wearing down of any object is implied in its use.

It is clear that if in the process the analyst sees himself as the object that must survive, he will more easily feel responsible for the possible interminability of the analysis compared to someone who puts everything on the patient’s shoulders (death drive, envy, etc.).

Winnicott’s theory of destruction, reread in the light of Hegel’s theory of love, can shed new light on the always delicate issue of transference love in analysis. It allows us to set aside the unconvincing distinctions between erotic transference (good, positive, true) and eroticized transference (bad, negative, false), and instead replace it with that between the unilateral and absolute love of those who, like Antigone, consider only the laws of blood (Cantarella, 2024), and the nonunilateral and nonabsolute love of those who, in addition to the laws of blood (read: affections), also give space to the laws of men (in analysis, the rules of the setting and the ethics of care). In the case of unilateralism, transference love can easily become interminable analysis sustained by mutual collusion and idealization, or, conversely, can be pathological hate and destruction. These would be the sign of a real failure of the analysis, and not of “the delusion of failure” which, surprisingly, according to Winnicott (1968/2018n, p. 216) must be part of every successful analysis.

It is also evident that, through the concept of destruction, the shadow of the great Separation of death hovers over the theme of birth from the very beginning, and over the author himself, imparting to the text a sense of the sublime. “Imagine how traumatic can be the actual death of the analyst,” Winnicott (p. 225) writes at one point. But it’s not just that. Winnicott knows that with UO he is eliminating the parents, Klein and the “orthodox theory” (p. 226; cf. Winnicott, 1969/2018i, p. 252: “There are some shocks in store for the orthodox analyst if he looks further”). This is not without dangers. It’s as if, observing “how traumatic the actual death of the analyst can be,” he anticipated the hostile reception ¹² the essay received at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the very “destruction” of the heart attack he suffered soon after.

Joy of Technique

It is interesting that by “survival” of the analyst Winnicott also means maintaining the technique of care intact. As he writes, “The essential feature is the analyst’s survival and the intactness of the psycho-analytic technique” (p. 225). If for the mother it is “it is a tricky matter; it is only too easy for a mother to react moralistically when her baby bites” (p. 225), we can imagine how much more it can be for a therapist dealing with a devaluing and aggressive patient.

The passage is extremely significant. It is not difficult to recognize in the mother who “reacts moralistically” the model of the analyst who reacts in the same way when she feels hurt by the patient; or when she feels hurt by the difference represented by theories that are inassimilable to her. This raises the question of what ontology should underlie the ethics of psychoanalysis. In my opinion, if we start from the idea of primary aggressiveness as a kind of original sin of humanity—as essentially proposed by Freud and Klein—a practice of care with moralistic undertones more readily emerges. ¹³ For example, in Freud’s (1932/1964a) work, the central metaphor is that of the police who must control and repress the wild crowd that populates the unconscious.

In Winnicott’s vision, aggressiveness is not the original evil and the environment assumes a key role. From such a vision, a practice of care whose ethics is based on an ontology of the “we” or “an ontology of the common” (Nancy, 1997/2002, p. 109) or “ontology of being-with-one-another” (Nancy, 1996/2000, p. 53) more easily derives—that is, an ontology in which the good of the freedom and creativity of the (individual) subject is founded on the “we” (plural) of mutual recognition. As Williams (1997) writes,

the We is a whole that is greater than he sum of its parts, and prior to each of its parts. The point is that the We is not negative but affirmative: “The universal self-consciousness is the affirmative knowledge of itself in another self.” This is the thesis on which Hegel’s idea of ethical life rests. (p. 116)

In the same paragraph, Winnicott aligns several noteworthy points: the psychoanalytic process is natural and the most important thing is not to disturb it; if the analyst knows how to wait, the patient will have the opportunity to show his own creativity; what was the narcissistic satisfaction of the analyst (relating) can now become a great shared joy (usage).

Let’s reread how the last sentence is written:

If only we can wait [and we read: accept a certain destruction, stay in negative capability/faith . . .], the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. (p. 219)

The syllable “joy” appears four times, and the repetition gives a musical rhythm to the sentence. It is impossible not to relate it also to the pleasure we experience in reading Winnicott, and in particular in allowing ourselves to “use” this essay of his on destruction.