Collected Works of D.W.Winnicott

Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) was one of Britain's leading psychoanalysts and paediatricians. The author of some of the most radical propositions in psychoanalysis: transitional space, the capacity for concern, the use of an object, and many more, Winnicott’s work remains of great relevance to 21st century psychoanalysis.

The Psychoanalytic Languages: On the Intimate Rivalry of Michael Balint and D.W. Winnicott

The article presents and discusses a two-decades correspondence between Michael Balint and D.W. Winnicott. Alongside closeness and friendship, the letters reveal tensions, disagreement and even rivalry between Balint and Winnicott on three main levels: personal, cultural and theoretical. The debate can be framed around the question of whether or not the British School of Psychoanalysis that emerged in the 1950s – and in which Winnicott and Balint were arguably the most senior figures – was a continuation of the psychoanalytic tradition that developed before the Second World War by Sandor Ferenczi and the Budapest School. The article argues, however, that there is another meta-theoretical level to the debate between the two: they passionately try to define what is the psychoanalytic language, and disagree about its real nature

Beyond "the Relationship between the Individual and Society": broadening and deepening relational thinking in group analysis

The question of ‘the relationship between the individual and society’ has troubled group analysis since its inception. This paper offers a reading of Foulkes that highlights the emergent, yet evanescent, psychosocial ontology in his writings, and argues for the development of a truly psychosocial group analysis, which moves beyond the individual/society dualism. It argues for a shift towards a language of relationality, and proposes new theoretical resources for such a move from relational sociology, relational psychoanalysis and the ‘matrixial thinking’ of Bracha Ettinger which would broaden and deepen group analytic understandings of relationality

A psychoanalytic concept illustrated: Will, must, may, can — revisiting the survival function of primitive omnipotence

The author explores the linear thread connecting the theory of Freud and Klein, in terms of the central significance of the duality of the life and death instinct and the capacity of the ego to tolerate contact with internal and external reality. Theoretical questions raised by later authors, informed by clinical work with children who have suffered deprivation and trauma in infancy, are then considered. Theoretical ideas are illustrated with reference to observational material of a little boy who suffered deprivation and trauma in infancy. He was first observed in the middle of his first year of life while he was living in foster care, and then later at the age of two years and three months, when he had been living with his adoptive parents for more than a year

From the Shell-shocked Soldier to the Nervous Child: Psychoanalysis in the Aftermath of the First World War

This article investigates the development of child analysis in Britain between the wars, as the anxious child succeeded the shell-shocked soldier as a focus of psychoanalytic enquiry. Historians of psychoanalysis tend to regard the Second World War as a key moment in the discovery of the ‘war within’ the child, but it was in the aftermath of the First War that the warring psyche of the child was observed and elaborated. The personal experience of war and its aftermath, and the attention given to regression in the treatment of war neuroses, encouraged Melanie Klein, Anna Freud and others to turn their attention to children. At the same time, however, the impact of the First World War as a traumatic event, with inter-generational consequences, remained largely unaccounted for within psychoanalysis as Klein and others focused on the child's riven internal world