Winnicott and Lacan and the space betweenAt the Spring 2005 meeting of Division 39, Deborah Luepnitz presented a paper on the relationship between the work of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. It is entitled:
"Thinking in the Space Between Winnicott and Lacan: Toward a New Middle Group?" She has kindly agreed to post it in our Essays section .
It is an intriguing study of two thinkers each who have had a complex and controversial relationship to their respective communities. As Luepnitz shows, they also had an interesting relationship to one another both personally and conceptually. The idea that we might think and work in ways that draw from both of these innovative figures is a promising and challenging notion. To integrate disparate approaches without overly diluting them is an admirable goal.
We post it with the hope that the discussion invited by the paper can take place in part on this website.
To see the essay go to:
Essays
And please send your comments and reactions.
Winnicott and LacanThinking in the Space Between Winnicott and Lacan: Towards a New Middle Group?*
by Deborah Anna Luepnitz
Following André Green (1986), the author maintains that the two most original psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud were Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Whereas in the past the two attracted almost non-overlapping audiences, a recent trend shows more analysts making use of both humanist Winnicott and post-humanist Lacan. This paper contrasts their views of the aims of treatment, as well as their organizing tropes of selfhood vs. subjectivity. Gregory Bateson's notion of 'double description' (following C. S. Peirce's construct of 'abductive reasoning') is invoked to theorize the bringing into provocative contact of two radically different paradigms. A clinical vignette is offered to demonstrate crucial concepts from both traditions in practice. The author asks if we are on the brink of a new independent tradition or 'new Middle Group' comparable to the one that emerged in 1940s' London. The benefits and risks of working in the potential space between Lacan and Winnicott are discussed.
'In the same river, we both step and do not step, we are and we are not.'
—Heraclitus, Fragment 49a
'…What we saw and grasped, that we leave behind; but what we did not see and did not grasp, that we bring.'
—Heraclitus, Fragment 56
Following an interview in 1990, British Middle Group analyst Marion Milner showed me her paintings from the 1930s and '40s. Pointing to a medium-sized canvas with two hens tearing each other apart—blood and feathers flying—Mrs. Milner said: 'I like to say it's Anna Freud and Melanie Klein fighting over psychoanalysis.'
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