Reading Winnicott into Nano-Psychoanalysis: 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom'

This article presents Winnicott's unique theoretical and clinical thinking, and especially his revision of the foundations of clinical psychoanalysis, as a Kuhnian paradigm shift that, as the title of the article indicates, I term nano-psychoanalysis. The title refers to ideas and terminology borrowed from nanoscience and nanotechnology, and particularly to physicist Richard Feynman's 1959 visionary talk that hailed nanotechnology and its radical potential: “There's plenty of room at the bottom—An Invitation to Enter a new Field of Physics.” I have paraphrased and applied it to Winnicott and to psychoanalysis: “There's plenty of room at the bottom—an invitation to enter nano-psychoanalysis,” and regard Winnicott as the originator of nano-psychoanalysis. For Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory, and particularly his clinical-technical theory with its emphasis on regression in the treatment of more disturbed patients, share the fundamental principle offered by Feynman and nanotechnology—that of going back to t...