comparison: Winnicott, Freud

• Winnicott had a strikingly different notion of the agent of psychological change than Freud.

  • Winnicott
    • His psychotherapeutic model was developmental, one that sees.
      • the therapeutic relationship and
      • the original parent-child relationship(s)
    • as analogous.
    • Thus, just as he saw the development of the child as being fundamentally tied
      • to the immediate, visceral relationship with the mother in the experiential unit.

  • psychotherapeutic change was all about the relationship between - client and - therapist.

    • This was later conceptualised as a shift
      • from a ‘one-person’ psychology
      • to a ‘two-person’ psychology.

  • Freud

    • Freud was focused on rational interventions from the outside
    • This gave way in Winnicott to a co-creative journey occurring in the area in between,
  • which was much more about who one was and what one did, than what one thought or said.
    • In his book Playing and Reality (1971),
  • Winnicott called the location of this experience ‘transitional space’,
    • alluding to its dynamic, insubstantial quality,
    • but also to its nature as a place of becoming.
  • It is, he said, a place we both
    • create and that
    • creates us
  • a paradox that we must accept and not try to resolve
  • where unformulated possibility replaces
    • fixed identities, and
    • experience is necessarily co-constructed.

comment

• Winnicott's transitional space is like
  • the Tibetan concept of the Bardo
  • the biological concept of evolution

• Winnicott’s concept of psychopathology was very different from Freud’s.
  • Freud
    • Freud understood psychopathology in terms of conflicts between:
      • the internal drives and
      • the external demands of the world
    • that what goes wrong is something internal to the person
      • only triggered by the outside world.
    • This basic idea is still very much alive in reductive psychiatric thinking and CBT, which, following the common dualistic model,
      • also locate the problem inside the mind/brain.
  • Winnicott
    • By contrast, Winnicott understood psychopathology primarily in terms of trauma or deficit in the relational domain,
    • which in turn follows from his inherently interpersonal understanding of the psyche.
    • Crucially, what goes wrong is not to be located in the individual per se,
    • but in the experiential units that the person was and is involved including, by extension,
      • the sociocultural milieu in which they find themselves.