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Autor omawia różnice między tym, co nazywa psychoanalizą epistemologiczną (zajmującą się poznaniem i rozumieniem), której głównymi twórcami są Freud i Klein, a psychoanalizą ontologiczną (zajmującą się byciem i stawaniem się), której głównymi architektami są Winnicott i Bion. Winnicott przenosi punkt ciężkości psychoanalizy z symbolicznego znaczenia zabawy na doświadczenie bawienia się, Bion zaś przenosi punkt ciężkości z symbolicznego znaczenia snów na doświadczenie śnienia we wszystkich jego postaciach. Psychoanaliza epistemologiczna obejmuje przede wszystkim pracę nad dochodzeniem do zrozumienia nieświadomych znaczeń; natomiast psychoanaliza ontologiczna stara się przede wszystkim umożliwić pacjentowi w sposób twórczy samodzielne odkrywanie znaczenia, a przez to umożliwić mu życie w sposób pełniejszy.

In this brief essay I am concerned not with finding the meaning of poems by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson; rather, I am engaged in describing the experience of reading these poems, the effects c...

The author tells the stories of the inception of mind that is developed in the work of five analytic theorists whom he sees as central to the evolution of a new and fertile form of psychoanalytic thinking and practice: Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Bion. The conception of mind presented by each of these authors moves from that of an apparatus for thinking (in the work of Freud, Klein, and Fairbairn) to that of a process located in the very act of experiencing (in the work of Winnicott and Bion). The work of each of the theorists constitutes a radical transformation of thinking relative to those who have preceded and those who follow him or her. The author, in telling the "stories" of the emergence of mind and the concept of mind according to each of these theorists, offers not only his own narrative structure and clarifications of their work, but also his own interpretations and extensions of their ideas.

The author discusses differences between what he calls epistemological psychoanalysis (having to do with knowing and understanding), for which Freud and Klein are principal authors, and ontological...

In his reading of Winnicott's "Transitional objects and transitional phenomena," the author views Winnicott as engaged in offering a way of conceiving of the fundamentally human task of creating states of being in which the individual's ideas, feelings, and bodily sensations come to feel alive and real to him or her. The author proposes that the concept of paradox captures something of both the idea and the experience of transitional objects and phenomena. The author then looks closely at the new clinical illustration that Winnicott presents in the fourth and final version of his paper. He discusses what he views as Winnicott's most evolved form of clinical practice. The author also takes up Winnicott's idea of "the negative," a state of being in which the gap, the amnesia, the death is all that feels real, while the presence or memory of the object feels unreal. The author offers an illustration of clinical work in which a significant alteration of the analytic frame provides a context in which the patient is able to begin to experience feelings that feel real and alive to him.

In “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,” Winnicott introduces the radical idea that communicating with subjective objects is “cul-de-sac” communication (communication not meant for any external or internal object), but which nonetheless endows every aspect of one’s experience with “all the sense of real.” He conceives of the “main point” of his paper to be the idea that “each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.” I suggest that the “main point” is more inclusive and might be stated as: each individual needs equally to be found (recognized, but not exposed) and to be unfound (an incommunicado isolate). Winnicott warns that when an analysis has reached the depths of the patient’s personality, interpreting destructively introduces what is “not-me” too close to the core self, so “the analyst had better wait.” An unstated question arises: what does the analyst do while he waits other than remaining silent...

THOMAS OGDEN: On reading Riccardo Lombardi’s Formless Infinity (2015), a thought occurred to me regarding the place of his work in the evolving psychoanalytic conception of the relationship between...

In this paper the author attempts to describe and illustrate how he talks with his patients. He avoids use of language that invites the patient to engage predominantly in conscious, secondary proce...

'The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications' is a landmark contribution that I find very difficult to write about because so much of what lies at its core is merely suggested. It is necessary for the reader not only to read the paper, but also to write it. In my reading/writing of the paper, the mother becomes real for the infant in the process of his actually destroying her as an external object (destroying her sense of herself as an adequate mother), and his perceiving that destruction. She also becomes a real external object for the infant in the process of his experiencing the psychological work involved in surviving destruction, a form of work that does not occur in the world of fantasied objects. The analyst or mother may not be able to survive destruction. It is essential that the analyst be able to acknowledge to himself his inability to survive and, if necessary, to end the analysis because of the very damaging effects for both patient and analyst of prolonged experience of this sort. The author presents clinical discussions of analyses in which the analyst survives destruction and is unable to survive destruction.

El uso de un objeto y la relacion por medio de identificaciones es un hito historico sobre el cual encuentro muy dificil hablar, ya que tanto de lo medular solo esta sugerido. El lector no solo tiene que leerlo, sino tambien escribirlo. En mi lectura/ escritura del articulo, la madre se vuelve real para el bebe en el proceso en el cual el la destruye de manera efectiva como objeto externo (destruyendo el sentimiento que tiene de si misma como madre adecuada), y en su percepcion de aquella destruccion. La madre tambien se vuelve un objeto externo real para el bebe en el proceso de su experiencia del trabajo psicologico involucrado en sobrevivir a la destruccion, una forma de trabajo que no ocurre en el mundo de objetos fantaseados. Es posible que el analista o la madre no sobrevivan. Es esencial que el analista pueda reconocer ante si mismo su incapacidad de sobrevivir y, si es necesario, finalizar el analisis debido a los grandes efectos perjudiciales que genera una experiencia prolongada de este tipo, ta...

This chapter reviews the vast literature bearing on the concept of the psychoanalytic subject which includes much of the analytic discourse addressing the concepts of the ego, the self, identity, and narcissism and so on. It discusses aspects of the concept of the dialectically constituted and decentred subject of psychoanalysis that have their origins in the work of S. Freud and which were developed by M. Klein and D. W. Winnicott. The chapter considers being some of the central dialectics bearing on the constitution of the subject introduced by Freud, Klein and Winnicott. It focuses on the development of a conception of an intersubjective context for the creation of individual subjectivity. A new type of intersubjective experience is generated through the I-Thou dialectic, dialectic of subjects creating one another through their recognition of one another as subjects. Emanating from a continuous process of dialectical negation, the subject is forever decentred from static self-equivalence.

L’article de Winnicott « La crainte de l’effondrement » est un travail inacheve qui exige du lecteur qu’il ne soit pas simplement un lecteur, mais qu’il se fasse egalement auteur d’un texte qui tend davantage vers une recherche de sens qu’a une presentation d’idees pleinement abouties. L’auteur du present article nous livre sa comprehension de l’argument souvent confus et parfois opaque du texte de Winnicott : suite a un effondrement2 du lien mere-nourrisson survenu dans la prime enfance, le nourrisson se voit contraint, seul, de prendre sur soi des evenements emotionnels qu’il est incapable d’assumer. Il court-circuite ses angoisses dissequantes primitives au moyen d’organisations defensives qui sont de nature psychotique – substituant a la realite externe une realite interne auto-creee, elles excluent chez le nourrisson toute possibilite de faire l’epreuve de ces evenements cruciaux. N’ayant pas eprouve l’effondrement du lien mere-nourrisson au moment de sa survenue dans la prime enfance, l’individu cree un etat psychologique ou il vit dans la crainte d’un effondrement qui a deja eu lieu, mais qu’il n’a pas eprouve. Dans le prolongement de la pensee de Winnicott, l’auteur suggere que la force qui pousse le patient a trouver la source de cette crainte est le sentiment d’etre prive de certaines parties de lui-meme, parties manquantes qu’il doit retrouver pour devenir entier. La vie qui subsiste en lui n’est, a bien des egards, qu’une vie non vecue.

The author's focus in this paper is on the role that language plays in bringing to life the truth of the patient's lived experience in the analytic session. He discusses particular forms of discourse that enable the patient to experience with the analyst the truth that the patient had previously been unable to experience, much less put into words, on his own. The three forms of discourse that the author explores-direct discourse, tangential discourse, and discourse of non sequiturs-do not simply serve as ways of communicating the truth; they are integral aspects of the truth of what is happening at any given moment of a session. The truth that is experienced and expressed in the analytic discourse lies at least as much in the breaks (the disjunctions) in that discourse as in its manifest narrative.

Schizophrenia is viewed in this paper as a form of psychopathology characterized by an intense conflict between wishes to maintain a psychological state in which meaning can exist, and wishes to destroy all meaning and thought as well as the capacities to create experience and to think. Moreover, there is an enactment of the latter set of wishes in the form of an actual attack on these capacities. Schizophrenic conflict differs from neurotic conflict in that the latter involves tension between coexisting sets of meanings that are felt to be incompatible, while the former involves a conflict between meaning and attack on meaning. In schizophrenia, defensive efforts to deal with meaning can become exhausted and when this occurs, the sphere of conflict shifts from the sphere of psychological representations and meanings to the sphere of the person's capacities for generating such meanings. Four stages, or types of attempted resolution of the schizophrenic conflict are presented: the stage of non-experience, the stage of projective identification, the stage of psychotic experience, and the stage of symbolic thought. In each stage a different equilibrium is reached between wishes to allow meaning and thoughts to exist and wishes to destroy all meaning. In addition, each stage is characterized by a specific form of enactment beyond the psychological representational sphere, by which the schizophrenic unconsciously limits his own capacity to perceive, experience and think. The theory of schizophrenic conflict presented in this paper represents an attempt to address the interface between the sphere of psychological meanings and representations (e.g. thoughts, motivations, and fantasies) and the sphere of the person's capacities to create meanings and representations. The concept of actualization fantasy is introduced in an effort to make steps toward the development of bridging formulations that address the interplay between phenomena in these different spheres.

In this paper, I have proposed that Winnicott's concept of potential space might be understood as a state of mind based upon a series of dialectical relationships between fantasy and reality, me and not-me, symbol and symbolized, etc., each pole of the dialectic creating, informing, and negating the other. The achievement of such a dialectical process occurs by means of a developmental advance from the 'invisible oneness' of the mother-infant unit to the subjective 'three-ness' of the mother-and-infant (as symbolic objects) and the infant (as interpreting subject). Failure to create or maintain the dialectical process leads to specific forms of psychopathology that include the experience of the fantasy object as a thing in itself, the defensive use of reality that forecloses imagination, the relationship to a fetish object, and the state of 'non-experience'. The 'processing' of a projective identification is understood as the re-establishment of the recipient's capacity to maintain a dialectical process (e.g. of me and not-me) that had been limited in the course of the recipient's unconscious participation in the projector's externalized unconscious fantasy.