Reading Winnicott

In its first century, psychoanalysis has had several great thinkers, but from the author’s viewpoint, only one great English-speaking writer: Donald Winnicott. Because style and content are so interdependent in Winnicott’s writing, his papers are not well served by a thematic reading aimed exclusively at gleaning “what the paper is about.” Such efforts often result in trivial aphorisms. Winnicott, for the most part, does not use language to arrive at conclusions; rather, he uses language to create experiences in reading that are inseparable from the ideas he is presenting, or more accurately, the ideas he is playing with.