Using Winnicott, Part II

In Playing and Reality (1971) Chapter 4: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self, Winnicott hopes to illustrate how, if the analyst would sometimes just get out of the way, the patient will come into a sense of self in her/his “search for the self.” In his clinical example, Case In Illustration (pp. 56-64), he allows a three hour session with a patient because she needs a lot of time to come into being, as it were. He believes he is allowing the patient freedom from his intrusions, impingements, derailments, [and cleverness] by his protracted silence. [Indeed, the patient may have felt Winnicott to have been palpably present by his demeanor, benevolent attitude, ability to hold her in his mind, etc., but the reader does not have this benefit.]

Upon rereading this case with the first year class at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc, I was struck by the patient’s many attempts to feel Winnicott more significantly engaged with her. She says: “I’m loathe to come into this room…I feel of no consequence.” Winnicott adds that she cites “Odd details of my dealing with her, implying that she is of no consequence.” She states “I don’t matter.”

When the patient eventually speaks of positive feelings and activities, Winnicott takes this as evidence of her be[com]ing real as if this naturally unfolded by her creative play, alone in the presence of the other. What Winnicott does not acknowledge here is that this ‘positiveness of being’ followed both his interpretation (indicating he understood how withering and deadening it is when there is no one to give back to her her experience; no mutuality, as it were) and his responsiveness that she drink up the milk he had made available there for his patients.

Having reported more of her feelings and activities, she then asks, “Where are you? Why am I alone so?...Why don’t I matter anymore?” And, after talking about her birthday experiences, the patient says, “I feel as if I have wasted this session. I feel as though I came to meet somebody and they didn’t come.” [Here I think the patient is talking about Winnicott’s absence, as he tries to stay out of her way, from being in the space with her.] Winnicott speaks, reflects back, and the patient says, “I get a feeling sometimes that I was born.” [I take this as further confirmation that it is Winnicott’s participation which enlivens the patient.] Winnicott reflects for her what she may have always felt: that others were not glad that she was born, that they did not enjoy her. She confirms this with: “what is so awful is existence that is negatived” [negated]. She continues and asks [hopefully], “…is there a little soul waiting to pop into a body?”

Winnicott emphasizes, from the patient’s dream: “I might find a me—get in touch with a me,” that the patient is “trying to show you me” for the first two hours of the session. Winnicott writes: “The searching can come only from desultory formless functioning, or perhaps from rudimentary playing, as if in a neutral zone.” Yet I could not help noticing that the patient was only enlivened, came into being, when Winnicott spoke to her in such a way as to communicate his understanding of her, thereby giving her evidence of his having been listening attentively, and had done so because she was significant to him. Perhaps his patient felt his silence as an indication that she was insignificant to him.

In class, I was equally struck by one first year student who could so adeptly feel her way into Winnicott’s position, illuminating to the class a different point of view from mine, and imagine that his patient, having perhaps had demanding, intrusive parents, who forced compliance of her being to theirs (that she please them, say what they wanted to hear), would very much need an analyst who stayed out of the way, letting the patient say what she wanted, or say nothing at all, indicating she would not have to please the analyst. [Still, I thought, when Winnicott was pleased to let the patient give an interpretation that he would have made himself, that the patient was indeed saying something she thought he might want to hear, and doing so perhaps to keep him engaged with her.]

Had Winnicott lived today, would he now drop the ‘the’ of “the self” and characterize self as a more fluid, emerging entity? More importantly, would he have transformed his theory to view interaction through a slightly more contemporary lens, a lens which recognizes the need for all of us, including patients, to be seen, to have an effect, to feel significant to someone, even to one’s analyst, to recognize that we all need, at times, the presence of an effected other to come into being? Or would silence, as an indictor of respect for the patient's creativity and being alone in the presence of the other, still loom so large with a patient so desperate to feel significant to her analyst?