Between Winnicott and Lacan

A Clinical Engagement

Lewis A. Kirshner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136912306
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

D. W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan, two of the most innovative and important psychoanalytic theorists since Freud, are also seemingly the most incompatible. And yet, in different ways, both men emphasized the psychic process of becoming a subject or of developing a separate self, and both believed in the possibility of a creative reworking or new beginning for the person seeking psychoanalytic help. The possibility of working between their contrasting perspectives on a central issue for psychoanalysis - the nature of the human subject and how it can be approached in analytic work - is explored in this book. Their differences are critically evaluated, with an eye toward constructing a more effective psychoanalytic practice that takes both relational and structural-linguistic aspects of subjectivity into account. The contributors address the Winnicott-Lacan relationship itself and the evolution of their ideas, and provide detailed examples of how they have been utilized in psychoanalytic work with patients.

Contributors: Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, James Gorney, Andre Green, Mardi Ireland, Lewis Kirshner, Deborah Luepnitz, Mari Ruti, Alain Vanier, Francois Villa .

Chapter 1

Thinking in the space between
Winnicott and Lacan¹

Deborah Anna Luepnitz

In the same river, we both step and do not step, we are and we are not.

Heraclitus (Fragment 49a)

… What we saw and grasped, that we leave behind; but what we did not see and did not grasp, that we bring.

Heraclitus (Fragment 56)

Following an interview in 1990, British Middle Group analyst Marion Milner showed me her paintings from the 1930s and 1940s. Pointing to a canvas with two hens tearing each other apart—blood and feathers flying—Mrs. Milner said, “I like to say it’s Anna Freud and Melanie Klein fighting over psychoanalysis.”²

She was referring, of course, to the 1940s battle that derailed careers, ended friendships, and nearly destroyed the British Psychoanalytic Society. It culminated with the group’s bifurcation into the A and B groups, each member bound to choose allegiance. The person whom both Klein and Anna Freud trusted, and who refused to choose sides, was Donald Woods Winnicott. While he did not set out to create a third, nonaligned faction, Winnicott became identified with the Independents, or “Middle Group,” which was to have a lasting impact on psychoanalytic thinking the world over. Few contemporary analysts, whether their primary identification be Freudian, Kleinian, Jungian, Kohutian, or relational, have not been influenced by constructs such as the good-enough mother, the transitional object, potential space, borderline states, the squiggle game and—perhaps most importantly—the clinical use of countertransference as a source of information about the analytic process. ³

Another schism in the psychoanalytic world occurred some 20 years later—this one ending with no comparable entente. I am referring to the events that began with the International Psychoanalytical Association’s (IPA’s) investigation of Lacan’s experimentation with analytic time and ended with what he called his “excommunication” from that body (Lacan, 1981, p. 3). Lacan established his own school, the École Française de Psychanalyse, which was renamed the École Freudienne de Paris. ⁴ Despite this schism, Jacques Lacan maintained a cordial relationship with Donald Winnicott. Lacan arranged for the French translation of Winnicott’s paper on the transitional object—certainly a sign of respect—but he also gently mocked his British colleague for years as a “nurse analyst” susceptible to reducing Freud’s radical project to a practice of “Samaritan aid” (Lacan, 1977, p. 36).

Winnicott (1971) wrote, “Jacques Lacan’s paper Le Stade du Miroir [The mirror stage] (1949) has certainly influenced me…” (p. 111). However, he neither described that influence nor appeared to comprehend Lacan’s widely cited piece. Winnicott, who acknowledged in a letter to Ernest Jones “a neurotic inhibition to reading Freud” (Rodman, 1987, p. 33), not surprisingly found Lacan’s re-reading of Freud incomprehensible. Many followers of Lacan and of Winnicott perpetuated the nonreading or aggressive misreading of the other man. For example, Middle Group analyst Charles Rycroft wrote, “… I found his [Lacan’s] writings a real load of rubbish” (1985, p. 5).

Many Anglophone clinicians persist in dismissing Lacanian psychoanalysis as a fringe movement. By some estimates, however, half the world’s practicing analysts identify as Lacanian (Fink, 2007, p. xii; Hill, 1997, p. 3). Consider also the perspective offered by Joyce McDougall, despite never being a member of Lacan’s circle: “In France, we are all Lacanians, just as we are all Freudians” (Forrester, 1990, p. 112). Jacques-Alain Miller (1981), while noting that Lacan was generally “pro-Winnicott,” made it clear that he himself was not. Miller argued that the preoccupation of Winnicott and the Middle Group with the role of the mother—all but ignoring a paternal element—constituted as normative a kind of phallic woman. Miller went so far as to claim that this fixation on an all-powerful mother would lead to a perverse system of thinking (“une propédeutique pérverse”) (Miller, 1981, p. 43). The same position was taken by Laurent (1981).

Following the 1977 translation of the Écrits into English, Lacan developed a following among Anglophone academics, and the relationship between Lacan and Winnicott attracted critical interest. A number of authors contrasted the two psychoanalysts’ theoretical positions, in most cases tendentiously. Some inveighed against the familiar humanism of Winnicott and the Middle Group in favor of the iconoclastic Frenchman, whom one author described as “the most important thinker in France since René Descartes” (Ragland-Sullivan, 1986, p. ix; see also Elliot, 1991; Finlay, 1989; Lonie, 1990; Mitchell, 1974; Moi, 1985.)

Others campaigned for the delightfully imaginative, guileless, environment-sensitive Winnicott over Lacan, the “narcissist” who rejected the mothering role of the analyst, overvalued the paternal/phallic function, and whose “opaque” style seemed designed to frustrate the reader (Flax, 1990; Rudnytsky, 1991; Rustin, 1991). ⁵

Have no clinicians set themselves to studying both Middle Group and Lacanian psychoanalysis? Even as early as the 1960s, there were a few. For example, Maud Mannoni, a member of Lacan’s circle, traveled regularly to London for supervision with Winnicott (Boukobza, 1999). And in 1984, Anne Clancier and Jeanne Kalmonovitch published a book of interviews with eight French analysts about Winnicott, revealing keen interest both in his theoretical and clinical contributions (Clancier & Kalmanovitch, 1987).

Conversely, interest in Lacan by Anglophone analysts has continued to grow as Lacanian training and study groups have arisen in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Further evidence is found in volumes such as Lacan in America (Rabaté, 2000) and Lacan and the New Wave in American Psychoanalysis (Gurewich, Tort, & Fairfield, 1999). (See also Fink, 1997; 2007.) For many years, a number of relational analysts have at least cited Lacan, and his impact on their thinking, while indirect, may be more profound than those passing citations would suggest (Benjamin, 1988; Mitchell, 1993). ⁶

Until very recently, the only psychoanalyst on either side of the Winnicott-Lacan divide whose original work reveals a deep understanding of both traditions was André Green (1986; 2000). Green, a onetime colleague of Lacan, chose at a crucial point to break ranks:

I had followed Lacan in the name of freedom of thought, and now he was upbraiding me for thinking for myself. It was the end of our collaboration…. The more familiar I became with their [Middle Group] frame of mind, the more I had the feeling that this was where I could find what was missing in Lacan’s approach, which seemed to me unsatisfactory, even misguided, in its abstraction. (1986, p. 9)

In contrast to the view of Winnicott as a “nurse analyst” without intellectual rigor, Green (1986) asserted: “I consider Playing and Reality to be one of the fundamental works of contemporary psychoanalysis” (p. 10). Although Green clearly admired Bion, Klein, and many others, his esteem for Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan appeared overarching:

After Freud, I see two authors who have pushed their research and coherence very far on the basis of two quite different points of view, and which up to a certain point converge. These two authors are Lacan and Winnicott. ⁷

For Green, constructs such as the pre-oedipal period, the borderline diagnosis, and the use of countertransference—all anathema in Lacan’s school—-became sine qua non. Green qualified his enthusiasm by adding, “I am not an unconditional Winnicottian…. [A]n analyst who really wants to think about practice cannot dispense with a reflection on language, a reflection that is absent in Winnicott” (p. 124). ⁸

A number of analysts in the past few decades, working independently of one another, have continued to build a conceptual bridge between Middle Group and Lacanian theory (Bernstein, 1999, 2006; Eigen, 1981; Gorney, 2003; Ireland, 2003; Kirshner, 2004; Lonie, 1990; Luepnitz, 2002; Mathelin, 1999; Rogers, 2006; Satorsky, 1993). These practitioners have placed themselves in a position that, in one sense, is analogous to that of London’s original Middle Group. Engaged by both Lacan and Winnicott, and disinclined to discipleship, they work in the area between two schools of allegedly incompatible thought. It might be useful to describe this area with Winnicott’s term “potential space,” which, by definition, both separates and joins two people or entities. The goal of these bridge-building authors, I believe, is not to forge a synthesis amounting to one master discourse, but rather to bring two radically different psychoanalytic paradigms into provocative contact. In an early draft of this chapter, I suggested that the abovenamed authors were moving toward something that could be called a new Independent tradition, or even a “New Middle Group.” Responses to this notion were univocal: The last thing psychoanalysis needs is another sect, a new “ism.” There is, indeed, no reason to refer to the contributors to this volume as anything other than analysts interested in both Winnicott and Lacan.

But why these two? Why not Lacan and Fairbairn or Winnicott and Bion? While pairing any two psychoanalytic authors can be heuristically useful, I argue for Winnicott and Lacan because, in addition to their exceptional impact on audiences both popular and professional—an impact few analysts since Freud could claim—they represent equally important ends of the analytic spectrum. Winnicott, it has been said, introduced the “comic tradition” into psychoanalysis, in contrast to Freud’s tragic vision (Phillips, 1988; Rudnytsky, 1991; Schafer, 1976).

Winnicott achieved this through both an emphasis on spontaneity and play, and through his meliorism. He sounded an occasional melancholic note (e.g., “… social health is mildly depressive—except for holidays,” Winnicott, 1989, p. 175), but his theoretical work, like his immensely popular BBC broadcasts about child development, was persistently upbeat. He believed that happy families are possible and that mankind is changing for the better. His position is 180 degrees out of phase with that of Lacan, who resonated with Freud’s pessimism, adding a gravitas that was all his own. One of Lacan’s most famous teachings is: “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” (There is no such thing as a sexual relationship). More sweeping still are his assertions: “There is something originally, inaugurally, profoundly wounded in the human relation to the world” (Lacan, 1954–1955, p. 167), and “Life does not want to be healed” (ibid., p. 233). If his rhetoric is hyperbolic, it was precisely to distinguish his position from that of the Middle Group, which did not shrink from terms like “health,” “wholeness,” “maturity,” and “mature intimacy.”

Just as Winnicott became a household name in England of the 1940s, so did Lacan become widely known in France in the 1960s and 1970s. Neither in his engagement with the student demonstrators of 1968 nor in his later television interviews would he spare his audience either his somber view of the world and the prospects for social change, or his famously recondite style of speaking.

Lacan and Winnicott addressed themselves to many of the same theoretical problems from obverse points of view, which is most evident in their writings on the mirror stage. Winnicott’s (1971) mirror stage is straight-forward and full of promise. The True Self of every individual is called into being in the mirroring gaze of the good-enough mother. Absent such a mother, the individual has a second chance with a good-enough analyst who can foster the self’s coherence and experience of w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan
• 2. The bifurcation of contemporary psychoanalysis
• 3. Winnicott and Lacan
• 4. Vicissitudes of the real
• 5. Applying the work of Winnicott and Lacan
• 6. The object between mother and child
• 7. The space of transition between Winnicott and Lacan
• 8. Winnicott with Lacan
• 9. Human nature
• Index