Loewald and Winnicott’s Theoretical Convergence

The Mother/Infant Dyad

Loewald, more than Winnicott, explored and theorized intrapsychic development. But while on one level his unit of study was individual dynamics, on another it was anything but. Loewald (1951, 1952, 1970, 1975, 1988) explicitly challenged Freud’s one-person model and instead focused on the mother/infant matrix—on the individual embedded in the interpsychic field.

Winnicott did something similar. While influenced by Klein, Winnicott’s unit of study was not drive-informed intrapsychic processes; it was the dyad—relationally and intrapsychically experienced. As in his famous 1960 statement “there is no such thing as an infant” (Winnicott, 1960/1965b, p. 39), Winnicott located development in the baby’s experience of the mother and in the mutual, interactive processes that occur between them.

Still, at first glance, the overlap between the two is not obvious. Loewald’s and Winnicott’s writing styles and ways of communicating were very different. Each employed a rather idiosyncratic lexicon that in part mirrored differences in their theoretical conceptualizations and the psychoanalytic cultures from which they came. Where Loewald’s writing style was academic and metapsychological, Winnicott’s was playful, poetic, sometimes impenetrable, and always recognizable as uniquely his. But beyond the issue of style lies the more substantial question of their overlaps: What was each saying? How do their formulations collide and how do they overlap?

Loewald and Winnicott met only once, and briefly—at a 1951 meeting of the International. Indeed, it’s widely believed that the two didn’t read each other’s work closely, much less exchange ideas. But while there’s no evidence that Winnicott read Loewald at all (he never cites him; Steinbock, 2025), Loewald did read Winnicott; he references Winnicott in multiple essays (e.g., Loewald, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975). In fact, Loewald’s 1988 book Sublimation devotes three chapters to Winnicott’s work. And White’s discovery in the Yale Library of unpublished correspondence between the two suggests that Loewald read Winnicott more carefully than had previously been believed (R. S. White, personal communication, April 19, 2026).

Whose Idea Is this, Anyway? Analytic Borrowing

In my writing groups, I regularly encounter evidence that Bloom’s (1973) anxiety of influence is alive and well in our field. Nearly all of my students (and sometimes I) struggle with a nagging worry that we’ve got nothing new to say, that it’s all been said before (Slochower, 1998).

Both Loewald and Winnicott were aware of this and perhaps felt it themselves: Implicitly recognizing the then-uncodified rules of intellectual property, each acknowledged that creative psychoanalytic work carries the risk of inadvertently (or intentionally) “stealing” another theorist’s ideas.

Loewald opens his “Waning” essay with this acknowledgment: “Many of the views expressed in this paper have been stated previously by others in some form” (p. 1). Loewald says this a second time when he quotes Breuer’s introduction to Freud on the problem of originality and creative theft (Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895/1955):

I hope, therefore, that I may be excused if few quotations are found in this discussion and if no strict distinction is made between what is my own and what originates elsewhere. Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in the following pages. (pp. 185–186)

Compare these two modest statements with Winnicott’s (1958) in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: “It’s no use . . . asking me to read anything! If it bores me I shall fall asleep . . .” (p. xvi). Both theorists convey some discomfort, perhaps even anxiety, about the originality of their ideas. But where Loewald’s disclaimer is a bit self-effacing, there’s a subtle and (to me) charming arrogance in Winnicott’s (see also Goldman, 2017). Although he sometimes acknowledges his debt to Klein (e.g., Winnicott, 1962/1965a), Winnicott implies that it’s his prerogative to ignore or override the academic obligation to acknowledge, if not honor, the contributions of his psychoanalytic forefathers. If Winnicott was discomfited by the possibility that he had committed intellectual theft, that discomfort went unexpressed.

A vulnerability to inadvertent intellectual theft is probably ubiquitous. Indeed, it was only after I wrote this essay that I reread Ogden’s (2006) wonderful paper on Loewald and discovered that he quotes the same two paragraphs! So I guess I’m stealing too.

Loewald’s Move Toward the Dyadic

Loewald self-identified as a Freudian. While he aimed to retain the Freudian model—its language and basic assumptions—he very much went his own way. Without directly (or, I suspect, implicitly) rejecting Freud, Loewald creatively enriches and reconceptualizes many dimensions of that perspective, perhaps most notably the dynamics of the Oedipus complex. By identifying its central role in the move toward separation, Loewald goes well beyond Freud and introduces a new perspective on development (see Ogden, 2006).

Emphasizing the goals of autonomy and individuation more than relatedness and mutuality in the developmental trajectory (Whitebook, 2004), Loewald makes clear that there’s ongoing, nonlinear movement between the two themes: The push to separate and individuate requires a good maternal environment. In this sense, Loewald integrates the pre-oedipal and the oedipal; developmental processes shift back and forth between dependence and independence, between connection—even merger—and separation: ¹

I have pointed out that the superego as the heir of the Oedipus complex is the structure resulting from parricide, representing both guilt and atonement for the usurpation of authority. We are reminded that the oedipal attachments, struggles, and conflicts must also be understood as new versions of the basic union-individuation dilemma. The superego, as the culmination of individual psychic structure formation, represents something ultimate in the basic separation-individuation process. (Loewald, 1979, p. 774)

Loewald takes us further when he suggests that the impetus to separate, to gain a sense of agency, in part coalesces into an (unconscious) wish to commit parricide:

It is no exaggeration to say that the assumption of responsibility for one’s own life and its conduct is in psychic reality tantamount to the murder of the parents, to the crime of parricide, and involves dealing with the guilt incurred thereby. Not only is parental authority destroyed by wresting authority from the parents and taking it over, but the parents, if the process were thoroughly carried out, are being destroyed as libidinal objects as well (all this, as I have already mentioned, pro tempore). (p. 757)

By parricide, Loewald doesn’t refer solely to fantasies directed at the father, but to the symbolic destruction of any parental object. These parricidal fantasies are emotionally complex; they evoke guilt, terror, shame, and a desire to repair. It’s only when the superego is internalized that all of this is transmuted into intrapsychic structural relations.

But even after the superego is internalized, the oedipal drama continues to play out:

In adolescence the Oedipus complex rears its head again, and so it does during later periods in life, in normal people as well as in neurotics . . . there is no definitive destruction of the Oedipus complex, even when it is more than repressed; but we can speak of its waning and the various forms in which this occurs. (Loewald, 1979, p. 753)

For Loewald, then, the Oedipus complex is not simply resolved; it lurks inside the child (and the adult); it remains a psychic theme that periodically fades and reemerges over the lifespan.

Psychoanalysis has tended to emphasize the value of autonomy more than attachment in the developmental trajectory (Slochower, 2022; Whitebook, 2004). But Loewald doesn’t tell us a linear story about the move from dependence to independence; he includes the preoedipal in his theorizing, albeit in a complicated fashion. Adding a complicating element, Loewald notes that in tandem with the pull to separate, the child carries a powerful drive toward unity, symbiosis, fusion, merger, or identification across the process (Loewald, 1951). Was Loewald’s “Waning” paper in part an attempt to rebalance this turn by (re)emphasizing the separation theme?

Loewald goes further when he introduces the idea that symbolic murder accompanies the move to separate. In a lovely clinical vignette about a man whose writer’s block reflected unconscious anxieties about committing parricide, Loewald illustrates the power of these unconscious fantasies:

A student, working for a degree in the same field as his father’s, had trouble in completing his thesis. He was brilliant; the thesis so far had progressed well. His father had died about a year earlier. The patient began to procrastinate; he felt strongly that he needed support and advice from his thesis advisor. But he knew quite well that he was perfectly capable of finishing the work on his thesis without help. He chided himself for his delaying techniques. . . . Becoming independent, taking responsibility for the conduct of his own life, was one of the themes that had come up repeatedly during the analysis . . . it dawned on me that he might be speaking of responsibility also in a sense not consciously intended by him . . . perhaps he was talking about being responsible for a crime. It would be a crime he wished to delay, avoid, or undo. An interpretation along these lines led to further work on his relationship with his father, his murderous impulses and fantasies regarding him, his ambitions and fears of outdistancing him, and on his guilt about these ambitions (in part already fulfilled) and about his father’s death. In this case, as in so many others, preoedipal currents and those belonging to the positive and negative Oedipus complex were inextricably blended. (Loewald, 1979, pp. 754–755)

This dynamic is familiar to most of us. When my artist patient David was selected to receive a major award, he was initially thrilled. But in our subsequent session, he reported a dream that, he said, had “spooked” him: As he was called up to the podium to receive the award, David caught sight of his (far less successful) parents’ dead bodies on the side of the road. Certainly, other dynamic themes (for example, fear of success and/or castration anxiety) may well have been embedded in the dream material, but here I focus on David’s very vivid image of (sur)passing his dead parents en route to his own success. The depth of his guilt about having left them behind (and having wanted to) was intense. And no, he hadn’t read Loewald.

Parricide isn’t simply symbolic. Children actively contribute to parents’ dying by virtue of their moves toward separation. A generational reconciliation may be achieved, but it remains fragile. We see this, certainly, when an angry adolescent turns violently away from the parents or their values. But even the adolescent who appropriates the parent(s)’ belief system whole cloth may implicitly (if not explicitly) demand that the parent step aside and hand over the reins.

Loewald, then, goes beyond the view that as the oedipal struggle is resolved and the superego internalized, parricidal fantasies are replaced by identificatory processes. He believes that the struggle to find a personal voice separate from that of parental objects embodies more than separation/emancipation because the child symbolically destroys the parental object in the process (Rehm, 2013).

As the Oedipal complex wanes, the father is experienced less as an external rival and is gradually internalized; this paternal identification complicates parricidal fantasies. Nevertheless, early fantasies and conflicts around parricide persist; they recur in adolescence and often across the lifespan.

As those of us who have parented children, whether directly or indirectly know, this kind of symbolic aggression doesn’t feel great. At a conference some decades ago, a colleague illustrated just this when she described her experience as a new grandmother. Moving to pick up her newborn grandchild, she was quietly told “You have to hold the head.” Suddenly, this very competent mother of adult children was rendered incompetent. A moment of symbolic murder?

Whether these kinds of parricidal fantasies are inevitably part of the separation process remains an open question. It certainly seems plausible that some children find their way to agency while sustaining a trusting relationship with the father. Destruction (of the parental object) may be a common, but probably not an inevitable, companion to the move to separation.

Parental Subjectivity: Ghosts and Ancestors

In Loewald’s (1979, pp. 248–249) wonderful conceptualization, the oedipal drama’s resolution allows parental objects to be internalized; they become ancestors rather than ghosts that haunt. If there’s a Loewaldian idea that has found its way into the clinical work and thinking of many across the theoretical spectrum, this is it. I think we all aim to help patients turn familial ghosts into ancestors, to find their own way in the world without metaphorically killing off/negating/diminishing their parental ancestors.

At first glance, the idea that the child separates from the parent who accepts and doesn’t react or retaliate suggests that the process is essentially intrapsychic. But Loewald’s conceptualization is anything but one-person: He identifies a dyadic element at its center by including the parent’s reaction to this move. It’s not only the child who experiences separation as a violent attack; the parent who is the object of the child’s urgent need to separate likely will him/herself feel “murdered.” By identifying the parent’s vulnerability (i.e., subjectivity), Loewald reminds us that there are two subjects in this drama. Note that, like Winnicott, Loewald implies (though he doesn’t explicitly state) that the parent must survive; that is, must accept the child’s murderous moves without retaliating against the child. By involving—dare I say implicating—the parent, Loewald pushes our developmental understanding in the direction of a relational perspective and away from what might otherwise be viewed as an entirely intrapsychic parricidal fantasy. Which brings me to Winnicott’s notion of object usage and the discovery of otherness.

Winnicott’s “Hullo Object”

On the surface, there’s nothing very Loewaldian in Winnicott’s “Use of an Object” or, more generally, in his thinking. Winnicott paid glancing attention—at best—to the role of oedipal anxieties, the internalization of the superego, sexuality, or the desire to separate from parents in developmental processes. Along with his object relational colleagues, Winnicott focused almost exclusively on the mother-infant relationship—on the mother’s capacity to hold. Yes, he viewed development as moving “from dependence toward independence,” but he spent little time on the latter theme.

I’m going a bit out on a limb here when I suggest that Winnicott’s conceptualization of the move from object relating to object usage is, in some important ways, analogous to Loewaldian ideas about parricide, the developmental push to separate, and the inclusion of the parental experience of the child’s symbolic murderousness.

The concepts of object relating and object usage may be familiar, but they’re frequently misunderstood. I’ve taught them to hundreds of students—theoretically sophisticated and not—over decades. Because of Winnicott’s rather infelicitous—perhaps provocative—choice of words, this essay has broken more than a few young heads.

Certainly, the word use is a term that makes us think of something, well, bad; it suggests that we’re treating the other like an object, rather than as a subject with its own personal experience and ways of being. Relating, in contrast, implies a capacity to stay in relation to the other.

The novice reader typically understands object relating to be a more “mature” or evolved psychological state than object usage. After all, that’s its traditional English meaning. In his quirky way, Winnicott inverted ordinary language and made us work at deciphering his meaning. I’ve often wondered whether he was playfully poking at his colleagues, being a bit of an enfant terrible in so doing. Because Winnicott actually used the term object relating to describe the obverse phenomenon. Object relating describes the baby’s involvement with an object that’s “created” by the subject.

In object relating, the other is a created (projected) object; it lacks a separate subjectivity; it’s “like me” and is loved for its similarity to the self. In object relating, the other is a created (projected) object; it lacks a separate subjectivity; it’s “like me.”

From a Kleinian perspective, object relating essentially involves the fantasied creation of the object via projective identification. My view is a bit different. I understand object relating to embody the nascent processes by which the child begins simultaneously to create and discover the object “out there.” I think, for example, about how some infants lock eyes with Mother and put their hand in her mouth or on her cheek when nursing. On one level, the mother/analyst’s essential holding function isn’t noticed unless it’s missing. But on another, might there be times when the infant shows a dim awareness of Mother’s outside existence. Yes, the object’s otherness is quite limited in that what’s perceived is exclusively what’s resonant with the self. But still, I wonder: Might the projective element include a nascent external dimension in that the mother is simultaneously discovered and created by the subject?

Elsewhere (Slochower, 1994, 1996, 2024) I’ve suggested that object relating describes the child (or patient’s) experience during a holding process. The baby/patient “creates” the mother/analyst in that she does her best to meet the baby where it is (and where it wants her to be). Mother allows this and doesn’t introduce evidence of her otherness to the baby. On one level, she exists outside the self in a way the baby can encompass (i.e., without disturbing otherness). Yet on another level, Mother has no separate existence because there’s no requirement that the baby/patient hold onto difference or doubleness; the mother is created more than found. ² Only when object usage has been established—that is, when the object survives destruction—does it begin to fully exist independent of the projection.

It’s the achievement of usage, then, that allows the subject to reliably experience the object as existing beyond the subject’s fantasied control, to say, “Hullo object” (I see that you are actually “out there.”). In Winnicott’s view, this process will gradually evolve in the direction of the discovery of otherness.

Winnicott’s “object usage,” then, does not allude to a sort of narcissistic self-involvement in which the object is treated like a thing rather than a subject, but instead to describe a shift toward dyadic recognition. A solid capacity to recognize, tolerate, and even appreciate otherness reflects a reliable capacity for object use. The baby becomes able to test out and gradually integrate the reality of the mother’s otherness or separateness. Without that capacity, we would live in a world dominated by projections and fantasied sameness. And without joy. Notably, Winnicott’s introduction of positive affect into the developmental process itself represents a move beyond Klein. There’s no joy in the Kleinian model.

For Winnicott, this achievement is developmentally central. To quote what may be his most famous statement on the matter:

This thing that there is in between relating and use is the subject’s placing of the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control; that is, the subject’s perception of the object as an external phenomenon, not as a projective entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own right. This change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys the object. . . . after “subject relates to object” comes “subject destroys object” (as it becomes external); and then may come “object survives destruction by the subject.” . . . It is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control. . ..destruction plays its part in making the reality, placing the object outside the self. . . . (it is important that “survive,” in this context, means “not retaliate” . . . the analyst, the analytic technique, and the analytic setting all come in as surviving or not surviving the patient’s destructive attacks. This destructive activity is the patient’s attempt to place the analyst outside the area of omnipotent control, that is, out in the world. (Winnicott 1971, p.89)

And finally:

In psychoanalytic practice the positive changes that come about in this area can be profound. They do not depend on interpretive work. They depend on the analyst’s survival of the attacks, which involves and include the idea of the absence of a quality change to retaliation. These attacks may be very difficult for the analyst to stand. (Winnicott 1971, pp. 90–91)

Here, Winnicott theorizes the clinical centrality of the capacity to recognize a separate other. He locates this change outside the ordinary psychoanalytic frame (and implicitly differentiates himself from Klein and Freud) when he states that change does “not depend on interpretive work.”

An example: Marion, a new patient, came in for her second appointment and began our session by saying she was glad she’d picked me as her analyst because she was sure we were kindred spirits. “What made you realize?” I inquired (note that I didn’t interpret or challenge her declaration). Marion’s reply: In our first meeting, we were wearing the exact same sweater! This was not Marion’s distortion. Our real, not imagined, sweaters were identical.

Marion took this small bit of reality and used it to confirm a core wish—that we were the same (and to disconfirm an underlying dread—that we were alarmingly different). It was our perceived sameness that allowed Marion to open up very quickly. Only some years later did she come to recognize how urgently she had needed to see us as alike. By then, Marion could notice, wonder about, and eventually accept our considerable differences, despite these fashion overlaps; we were both separate and connected. Something profound had shifted.

Winnicott and Loewald: Differences and Overlaps

I see a fascinating parallel between Loewald’s notion of parricidal fantasies and Winnicott’s perspective on the acquisition of object usage. Despite their different ways of conceptualizing development, both locate symbolic destruction at the center of this process. But they conceive of it differently. Here’s Loewald (1979):

In an important sense, by evolving our own autonomy, our own superego, and by engaging in nonincestuous object relations, we are killing our parents. We are usurping their power, their competence, their responsibility for us, and we are abnegating, rejecting them as libidinal objects. In short, we destroy them in regard to some of their qualities hitherto most vital to us. (p. 758)

Loewald locates parricidal fantasies later in the developmental trajectory than does Winnicott, who focuses on the preverbal baby during the move to usage. Loewald is closer to Winnicott when he notes that, in addition to internalizing the superego, mastering oedipal guilt opens the door to a reconciliation with the object of parricidal fantasies; it allows us to refind love for the father. Still, although the authors locate these processes at different points on the developmental continuum, Loewald’s description evokes Winnicott’s notion of object usage. In both conceptualizations, parental’s survival of the child’s parricidal fantasies is central. Certainly, Winnicott emphasizes the absence of a move to retaliate on the object’s (parents’/analyst’s) part more than Loewald. But while Loewald doesn’t focus here, he notes that the separation-individuation process facilitates “subject/object differentiation.” To me, this sounds a lot like what Winnicott called object usage—a (joyful) recognition of otherness.

Certainly, the two concepts are not identical. Loewald’s theory of parricide describes a lifelong process beginning in childhood, recurring in adolescence and across the lifespan. In his view, we symbolically—and repeatedly—destroy the parent in the process of acquiring our own capacity for agency. Winnicott, more than Loewald, locates the origins of a similar (though not identical) process earlier, in infancy. Different from Loewald, he suggests not that the subject destroys the object (in fantasy), but instead, that the object survives destruction (by not retaliating), leaving the subject with a pleasurable sense of recognition.

Here’s another distinction: Where (in contrast to Klein) Winnicott articulates a consistently optimistic perspective on good-enough mothering and the child’s innate sense of morality, Loewald, less optimistic—or more realistic—points to the powerful role of anxiety, guilt, and repair in this developmental trajectory. Perhaps Loewald’s belief in the drives, in tandem with his Jewish roots and traumatic childhood experiences in wartime Colmar and Berlin until his escape to the United Kingdom in 1939, left him more intimately connected with these affect states than was Winnicott. After all, Winnicott was born in the United Kingdom, wasn’t Jewish, and didn’t live under Hitler.

Loewald believed that the oedipal child can encompass affects like guilt and anxiety in a way the younger child cannot. In contrast, Winnicott articulates a consistently hopeful developmental outlook that doesn’t involve the child’s ongoing struggle with guilt and loss.

Lest the reader think I’m obfuscating or being overinclusive, I note that there are also significant differences reflected in their thinking. First, Loewald’s notion of parricide tilts this dynamic process toward the child’s relationship to Father. Although Loewald states that parricide doesn’t refer exclusively to this relationship, the very term parricide underscores the paternal element. In contrast, Winnicott’s idea about the move from object relating to object usage is organized around the infant’s experience with Mother; Father plays almost no role in this process except as a buffer between Mother and environmental impingements.

Perhaps because Loewald locates these dynamics later in the developmental trajectory than does Winnicott, Loewald believes the child and adolescent’s move toward separation involves both unconscious fantasy and actual behavior. Winnicott’s view of the baby’s destructive fantasies is a bit less literal; after all, the baby’s fantasies—even if it bites the breast—don’t threaten Mother’s survival as a mother. But, as noted above, Winnicott recognizes that when this process is unsuccessful in infancy, it will be replayed in the analytic setting and/or across the lifespan. Here, the destructive element may be painful for the analyst (or parent). Winnicott underscores that the patient’s (verbal) attacks on the analyst often will be difficult for the analyst to tolerate:

These attacks may be very difficult for the analyst to stand, especially when they are expressed in terms of delusion, or through manipulation which makes the analyst actually do things that are technically bad. (I refer to such a thing as being unreliable at moments when reliability is all that matters, as well as to survival in terms of keeping alive and of absence of the quality of retaliation.) (Winnicott, 1971, p. 91)

Here, Winnicott directly identifies the parental element. Far from being impervious to the child or adolescent’s attacks, the parent (or analyst) remains a subject—and a vulnerable one at that—during this process. Like Loewald, Winnicott acknowledges the object’s (father/mother/analyst) difficulty tolerating the child’s attack. But where Loewald emphasizes the child’s need to separate from the parents (and symbolically murder them in the process), Winnicott (1971) suggests that the recognition of otherness will be accompanied by joy and a deeper connection:

The subject says to the object: “I destroyed you,” and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: “Hullo object!” “I destroyed you.” “I love you.” “You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” (p. 90)

Out of the child’s move toward what today we’d call intersubjective relating, then, emerges an ability to recognize and joyfully appreciate otherness. In Loewald’s recognition of the parent’s experience of the child’s parricidal fantasies I find a similar potential.

Here’s another difference between the two: Winnicott suggests that, provided the object survives (i.e., doesn’t retaliate), it’s the infant’s (fantasied) attack—in tandem with Mother’s nonretaliatory survival—that drives this discovery. But Loewald emphasizes something different: It’s the child’s efforts at separation that are key. Dare I suggest that Winnicott’s model places an interactive element (the child’s fantasied attacks and the mother’s nonretaliatory response) more fully at the center of this dynamic than does Loewald?

Still. Despite their different theoretical and clinical language, foci, and sensibilities, both Loewald and Winnicott emphasize the processes by which we emerge from states of merger and shift toward separateness. In so doing, we reconfigure our internalized (and sometimes actual) relationship with parental objects. Both theorists believe that aggression, even destructiveness, accompanies that evolution. Both view the guilt associated with destructiveness as an impetus to attempt repair. More than Winnicott, Loewald remains acutely aware of the darker side of things, perhaps because of the historical/cultural context in which he grew up.

What about clinical technique? On one level, the two worked very differently. Although Loewald (1986), like Winnicott (e.g., Winnicott, 1949), rejects the notion of analyst-as-blank-screen, he very much argues for analytic neutrality and an interpretive clinical stance. However, Loewald’s view of neutrality diverges significantly from its everyday—or traditional Freudian—meaning. For Loewald, neutrality doesn’t mean emotional detachment, objectivity, or passivity; it’s a disciplined, balanced responsiveness that allows the analyst to participate in the patient’s psychic world without dominating it. Balsam (1997) calls this kind of neutrality an effort to find a place of balance among the complex dynamic pulls that characterize the analytic situation: “Neutrality, following Loewald, is a highly disciplined strategy. It can be conceived as a negotiation among the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious influences emanating from the joint analytic field” (Balsam, 1997, p. 8).

Much more than Winnicott, Loewald believed in the clinical value of interpretation. By the end of his life, Winnicott came to believe that interpretations were useful only when made by the patient herself. His famous 1969 statement “I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limit of my understanding” (Winnicott, 1971, pp. 86–87) reflects his view that dynamic understanding is therapeutically powerful when it comes from the patient herself. (I note that, like most of us, Winnicott didn’t do as he said; he actually interpreted quite a lot.)

I suspect, then, that Winnicott and Loewald aren’t as different as they first appear. In an evocative essay linking aspects of Loewaldian and Winnicottian thinking, Steinbock (2025) connects Loewald’s concept of neutrality with Winnicott’s vision of holding:

Loewald’s neutrality links, in my view, with two crucial Winnicottian ideas: holding, and potentiality. Holding is always a layer of therapeutic work, though at times it resides beyond the patient’s consciousness. While conscious attention might be focused on more evolved, pre-Oedipal or Oedipal contents, none of this would be possible in the absence of a stratum of basic, ongoing trust, a groundwork that bears the possibility of reciprocity in mental processes, and of psychic movement (2025, pp. 46–47).

Steinbock suggests that Loewald’s notion of neutrality establishes an open therapeutic space that “allows what has not-yet-become to burgeon and emerge” (p. 6). Within this therapeutic space, the true self can be contacted.

While Winnicott did not, to my knowledge, speak of analytic neutrality, his conception of the holding environment is a vision of a safe, protected space within which the patient can contact early experience while protected from potentially disruptive environmental impingements. Doesn’t the analyst’s capacity to hold echo the Loewaldian view of neutrality insofar as both conceptualizations privilege the patient’s experience?

I turn now to the place of the analyst’s subjectivity in each writer’s perspective. Both believe that there are two subjectivities in the consulting room—that the analyst’s personhood always informs the clinical encounter. Yet, like most of their contemporaries (and like many today), both also view the explicit introduction of the analyst’s subjectivity/countertransference into therapeutic dialogue as problematic. To support the establishment and maintenance of the therapeutic frame, the analyst must attempt, as much as possible, to set aside or contain (what I’ve called bracket [Slochower, 1996]) her emotional reactions to the patient.

Of course, Winnicott didn’t always do as he said: At times he allowed his personal reactions full expression (e.g., Margaret Little, 1990, reports that he said, “I really hate your mother”). But beyond this perhaps singular countertransference disclosure, Winnicott goes beyond Loewald and boldly asserts that the analytic process remains incomplete if, even near its end, the analyst cannot tell the patient about his subjective reaction:

It was indeed a wonderful day for me (much later on) when I could actually tell the patient that I and his friends had felt repelled by him, but that he had been too ill for us to let him know. (Winnicott, 1949, p. 70)

To my eye, Winnicott sounds like a relational/interpersonal analyst when he suggests that the patient’s capacity to recognize her impact on the analyst is itself a therapeutic goal. Beyond the analytic self-disclosure involved, Winnicott has formulated a new clinical model in which mutual recognition or, in contemporary language, intersubjective exchange is a central therapeutic aim.

While Loewald’s emphasis on analytic objectivity represents a very different clinical vision, there’s something both new and controversial in his conception of that relationship. Loewald (1960) argues that protecting what he calls the patient’s “core” (I might say, with Winnicott, the True Self) “requires an objectivity and neutrality the essence of which is love and respect for the individual and for individual development” (p. 229). Love for the patient doesn’t sound much like analytic neutrality to me. And while Loewald may be invoking a metaphor akin to Sandler’s (1960) background of safety, like Winnicott he underscores the (dyadic) relational element. ³ Certainly, Loewald never goes so far as to identify explicit intersubjective exchange as an analytic goal. But he is close to Winnicott in helping the child—or patient—recognize the object’s otherness and separate capacity for agency. Is Loewald suggesting that the establishment of a holding environment is core to analytic progress, albeit in very different language, as Steinbock (2025) suggests?

Mutuality in Psychoanalytic Process

The central role of mutuality in human relating was not addressed by our psychoanalytic forefathers; their focus was primarily on individual, unconscious psychodynamics. Both Winnicott and Loewald nudged psychoanalytic thinking beyond the one person and introduced a dyadic element that would forever change analytic thinking.

Loewald acknowledges the inherent dyadic nature of the oedipal drama. He suggests, for example, that dread of merger with Mother informs parricidal fantasies (Loewald, 1951). While Loewald doesn’t explore how the parent’s emotional (or literal) response to that process affects the process, in “Waning” he acknowledges it; the infant can be understood only in the context of the mother-infant matrix.

Elsewhere (e.g., Loewald, 1986), Loewald makes the dyadic nature of the analytic relationship even more explicit: “analytic treatment is more and more understood in terms of a relationship between two participants” (p. 277). Winnicott, too, focuses much of his thinking about development on its dyadic elements. Two decades prior to the publication of “The Use of the Object” (in “Hate in the Counter-Transference” [Winnicott, 1949]), he identifies the impact of the child’s or patient’s hate on the mother and analyst in tandem with his emphasis on her capacity for containment.

In “The Use of the Object” Winnicott offers us his final perspective on the move toward dyadic relatedness. When the object survives the subject’s fantasied attacks (which for Winnicott means that the object doesn’t retaliate), the subject (baby or child) joyfully discovers the object’s otherness. Out of that experience emerges a nascent awareness that the (m)other exists outside the arena of omnipotent control, separate from the self.

Loewald and Winnicott, then, both name the parent’s subjectivity during these processes. But neither fully explores how the parent’s experience is affected by these difficult moments. Winnicott notes that the mother must receive the child’s communication and not retaliate, but he doesn’t speculate about her subjective response to the child’s attacks or what ensues between them in response. Nor does Loewald explore the mother’s experience beyond recognizing that the parent will feel the child’s attacks in a personal way. Left to later psychoanalytic generations is the question of how the parent/analyst’s subjective response to the child/patient informs the dyadic relationship and the parent/analyst’s experience of self.

I thus don’t think either Winnicott or Loewald got us all the way to intersubjectivity or mutual recognition. Neither explored how awareness of otherness facilitates a capacity to recognize and appreciate the other’s experience. More recent psychoanalytic writing, especially by Jessica Benjamin (1995) and Lew Aron (2001), fill in our understanding of this developmental process.

This notion of intersubjective engagement came to life for me decades ago when I encountered it on a personal level. It was a Sunday evening; my husband and our three kids stood on the street discussing where to go for dinner. Everyone wanted something different; my daughter wanted pasta; my eldest wanted Chinese, my 5-year-old, Japanese. But then the youngest paused and turned to me: “But Mommy, what do you want for dinner?”

At 5, my son (unsurprisingly, my third) demonstrated a capacity for mutuality. He knew what he wanted and could hold onto his preference while simultaneously acknowledging the other’s—my—different subjectivity.

The (often elusive) capacity for mature relatedness requires this ability—to engage with difference without negating or obliterating one’s own, or the other’s, experience. If we can recognize, be interested in, and even celebrate the other’s subjectivity when it clashes with our own, we’ve achieved what Buber (1923/1970) called I-Thou relatedness and what Hegel (1807/1979) called mutual recognition. This is the scaffolding on which mature object relations lie. Without it, otherness represents a threat to be denied or responded to with hostility, anxiety, or avoidance.

I’m suggesting, then, that despite their differences, Loewald and Winnicott share a similar clinical (developmental) vision of the child’s evolving capacity to recognize and appreciate otherness. They were ahead of their time both within and beyond the consulting room. How ironic that this capacity remains so extraordinarily elusive across our personal relationships, in group processes, and, of course, in the world.

I close with the words to a song that captures the essence of this theme.

Starting at about age 11, I spent nearly a decade of summers at a beloved camp in Maine. We sang communally every day, and I remember the words to nearly every song I learned there despite not having sung them in six decades. A few years ago, one came to mind as I taught a course on Winnicott and the relational turn to a group of Israelis. Their English was shaky and the concept of intersubjectivity eluded many. Suddenly I thought of a song that might help, and I sang it to them. ⁴

It worked. The class understood what I meant by intersubjectivity. Here are the words:

I’m proud to be me but I also see you’re just as proud to be you

We might look at things a bit differently but lots of good people do

That’s just human nature so why should I hate you for being as human as I

We’ll get as we give if we live and let live and we’ll both get along if we try

I’m proud to be me but I also see you’re just as proud to be you . . . It’s true,

You’re just as proud to be you

If only this capacity were not elusive to those in the White House and the larger world.