Donald W. WInnicott

It is often possible to retrace the history of a new concept or a new technique, identifying precursor and reflections that would lay the foundations for the birth of something "new". This also applies to the "squiggle game" of Donald W. Winnicott, one of the Winnicottian "creations" in which the distinctive signs of its fatherhood are more evident as, at the same time, are evident several debts to other scientists: from Freud's interpretation of dreams, through Jung, Klein and Fordham to Milner's "free drawings"...

Throughout this paper, the theoretical and clinical approaches of D.W. Winnicott are reviewed in order to reread the written production of Sándor Ferenczi. Winnicott's clinical and theoretical concepts allow returning to Ferenczi and rescuing aspects of his work that had been silenced in the psychoanalytic community. Ferenczi, in turn, is one that holds his presence in Winnicott's thought. Even though there are few times in which he cites Ferenczi in his work, it is possible to draw clear relationships between both theories...

This essay explores the place of infantile sexuality in the theories of Anna Freud and Donald W Winnicott. Both Anna Freud and D.W. Winnicott incorporated and at the same time changed the classical psychoanalytic account of infantile sexuality and the instinctual drives. Whilst Anna Freud remained closer to her father's original conceptualization, she developed a multidimensional model of development which gave the drives a foundational status whist also maintaining their significance in giving meaning and texture to children's subjective experience...

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In this essay I develop the logic of play from the writings of the British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The logic of play serves as both a conceptual framework for theoretical clinical thinking and a space of experiencing in which the therapeutic situation is located and to which it aspires. I argue that both Winnicott and Derrida proposed a playful turn in Western thinking by their attitude towards oppositions, viewing them not as complementary or contradictory, but as 'peacefully-coexisting'...

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In this paper, the author seeks to analyse the nature and function of metapsychological theory in Freudian psychoanalysis. He shows that Freudian psychoanalytic theory is composed of an empirical part--the psychology of clinical facts--and a speculative part--metapsychology. Freud considers this latter part as being a speculative superstructure of value that is only heuristic, capable of being supplanted by other superstructures of the same type. The author sustains the idea that this metapsychology is the fruit of speculative method, whose foundations were elaborated by philosophers and epistemologists before Freud, including Immanuel Kant and Ernst Mach...

Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), specialist in children's diseases, psychology and psychotherapy, tried to put together his experience in all these fields. His theories can be put between the orthodox psychoanalytic thought and a "relational" paediatrics. He made his research on the "global reality" of child rather than being interested in the "internal objects". Both the orthodox analysts, who condemned his theories, and the specialists in children's diseases, who didn't recognize the scientific aspect of his genius, criticised and opposed Winnicott...

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