New Center for Psychoanalysis

This event addresses: James Grotstein’s work in comparative psychoanalytic theory

Winnicott’s Analytic Technique: Learning from the Patient

Professor Lesley Caldwell, MA, PhD — Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London

In this first presentation, Lesley Caldwell examines Winnicott’s clinical trajectory as a pediatrician, adult analyst, and child analyst from the 1930s to 1971 with a major focus on the developments of the 1960s. Winnicott’s consistent attention to the primacy of the earliest environment and his work with babies, children, and disturbed adults in a variety of settings placed him firmly in the Middle, now Independent, group of British analysts; though he always considered Melanie Klein, one of his supervisors, to have made a profound contribution to psychoanalytic theory. He was particularly concerned with the development of the self and its absence as this emerged in the transference countertransference dynamic in certain patients; he argued for different forms of analysis for different kinds of patients, introduced an idea of ‘regression to dependence,’ and questioned the centrality of interpretation.