Winnicott

In "Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma," Winnicott reinvents the concept of psyche-soma by viewing it as a set of experiences located neither in the body nor in the brain, and in fact, not located anywhere. Psyche, in health, is understood to be the imaginative functioning of mental processes, and soma is understood to be the experience of physical realness and aliveness. Winnicott offers a clinical illustration of work with a patient who feels unreal to herself. He describes a juncture in the analysis in which the patient's somatic functioning is everything, while Winnicott, by feeling his own breathing and watching the patient breathe, knows that she is alive...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

In this paper I use clinical theory and illustration to explore details of the formulation of experience, which depends upon the metamorphosis of experience from not-me to feels-like-me. I take the position that the movement from not-me to feels-like-me, with the accompanying possibilities for formulating new meaning that open at such moments, happens when we not only know or feel something, but also, and simultaneously, sense ourselves in the midst of this process-that is, when we know and feel that it is we who are doing the knowing and feeling...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Personal life and achievements are the process and result of a person's past, present, and future interacting with each other. In this regard, if one fully understands the life and background of the person who developed the theory of psychoanalysis, one can understand and use the theory more appropriately. The holding environment theory developed by Donald Woods Winnicott is useful for understanding the process by which infants grow healthy under the care of a mother who is good enough. In this paper, the background of the birth of the holding environment theory is reviewed based on Winnicott's developmental background and marital life...

Participants in MDMA- and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy often emerge from these treatments with new beliefs about themselves and the world. Studies have linked changed beliefs with mystical experiences reported by some participants during drug sessions. While there has been some debate about the epistemic value of drug-induced mystical experiences, and about the need for consent to treatments that may alter metaphysical beliefs, less attention has been given to the sense of authenticity that attends these experiences...

Analysts and psychotherapists are beginning to have more thorough and probing discussions about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their work. Shifting to online teletherapy has been necessary due to the public health measures put in place to curtail the spread of the virus. Much of the existing literature addresses how using online platforms for teletherapy works for adults. This paper instead looks at its effects on working with children and adolescents. A contrast between Winnicott's notion of holding and Bion's concept of container-contained is reviewed through a summary of a paper by Ogden...

In this essay, by example of the physician-patient relationship and drawing on the work of D.W. Winnicott, I explore what may be possible together in relationships, and in the pursuit of health and flourishing, at understanding what we need, and getting ourselves and the other "right"-what we are afraid of and how we get each other wrong, and the distance or gap between "what has been" and "what might be." In pursuit of these questions, I consider what both physicians and patients might endeavor to do together to address this distance: to recognize and respond to each other, and to identify and address common needs and felt distances...

Various pleasant sensations that give a particularly intense pleasure are able to improve anxiety. In the present study I consider the possibility that their anti-anxiety action depends on the strong pleasure they provide, and I propose a possible mechanism of this action. According to some studies, also appetitive aggression (an aggression that provokes a strong pleasure and that is performed only for the pleasure it provides) can improve anxiety, and in this article I consider the possibility that the pleasure of appetitive aggression is able to reduce anxiety by the same mechanism I have proposed for other intense pleasurable sensations...

This essay attempts to expand the traditional model of negative countertransference by giving it a Lacanian twist. The author uses theories and concepts from Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan in order to explore the affective dimension of countertransference in two cases of trans-identified patients. In the first case, the author shows that wanting to do good was counterproductive, while in the second vignette maintaining a position of neutrality allowed the author to go beyond fear and pity, which led to a dynamic resolution...

The author discusses the analyst's neutrality as an activity: a constantly moving position and an always-evolving process characterized by the analyst's thinking and curiosity about how to help the patient better know and become himself. The author maintains that neutrality is a cluster concept (Wittgenstein 1953) that includes a number of functions. Recent theoretical shifts regarding neutrality are briefly reviewed, and an illustrative clinical vignette is presented.

Freud's "repetition compulsion" and Winnicott's "breakdown" are two divergent concepts that both arise out of an effort to think the unthinkable of death and annihilation. The relationship between these concepts will be examined in terms of their clinical, psychoanalytically theoretical, and philosophical aspects. Freud spoke of the "fright" of trauma, which threatens the functioning of the psychic apparatus, but then he devised a representational conception of death, leading to the hypothesis of the death drive...

The language and theories of Winnicott offer a lens for examining the importance of play in the development of the queer, transgender, and/or gender-nonconforming patient and the safety that virtual spaces-specifically, video games-provide for this play. While much of the literature posits the primary therapeutic value of virtual space as the site of psychic battle, interaction with a video game avatar can also be understood as an act of queerness-as-play, a potential cornerstone of healthy identity formation that may otherwise be precluded...

Features of ruthlessness may come into play in the encounter between adolescents who come into the therapeutic space with clear and precise demands to be supported through their gender transition. Winnicott's concept of ruthlessness, extended from the infant-mother matrix to the emotional situation of the clinic, allows a consideration of the conditions under which the analyst can think about adolescent demands. These conditions involve the desire of both patient and analyst for certitude and the analyst's urgency to respond, as well as the adolescent's contradictory desires to both destroy and create gender...

The author describes how the parasitic coronavirus encircled and disrupted the analytic frame and situation, activating anxiety in both therapist and patient. A patient is described with core intimacy difficulties whose primitive anxieties manifested in him the dis-regulation of the too-far (agoraphobic), too-near (claustrophobic) intimacy dialectic. Drawing on Winnicott, the author describes how these increased dialectic tensions, when contained, created a potentially transformational transitional space that helped to enhance the patient's mental and symbolizing capacity, that is, a capacity to make more from less...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.