Donald W. Winnicott and the History of the Present: Understanding the Man and His Work

November 2015, The Winnicott Trust held a major conference in London to celebrate the forthcoming publication of the Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. Most of the papers given then now constitute the chapters in this book, reflecting not only the ongoing contemporary relevance of Winnicott’s work—both clinical and theoretical—but demonstrating the aliveness of Winnicott’s contribution as present day practitioners and academics use his ideas in their own way. The chapters range from accounts of the early developmental processes and relationships (Roussillon, Murray), the psychoanalytic setting (Bolognini, Bonaminio, Fabozzi, Joyce, Hopkins), creativity and the arts (Wright, Robinson), and Winnicott in the outside world (Kahr, Karpf), to the challenge of the psychoanalytic paradigm that Winnicott’s ideas constitute (Loparic).

The phrase “the history of the present” draws on Foucault’s radical reconsideration about how to think about history and the present, using a so-called genealogical rather than an archaeological model. Using this genealogical concept in relation to our thinking about Winnicott, his ideas, and where they sit in psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytical clinical development reflects the breadth and depth of his work. Not only does it refer to his interest in the history of people, children, what happens to them in the very beginning of their lives, and how that is manifested later adulthood, but it refers to the genealogy of his ideas in the psychoanalytical movement. He sits in a particular relationship with Freud and Klein, and we now think of him in terms of a very rich history of psychoanalytic thinking. The ideas of family— the richness and complexity of relationships within a genogram— is a very helpful way of thinking about Winnicott and our relationship with him.