Donald Winnicott - Criticism

Criticism

'As theoretician, he is often elusive, but partly because his writings up to 1960 often had the subsidiary aim of trying to get Melanie Klein to modify her views'. From a Kleinian viewpoint, 'Donald Winnicott, who was always extremely respectful of Melanie Klein's work, could not stomach the notion of envy', just as he had led the Independent's 'common repudiation... the loathsome notion of death instinct'. To the hardliner, such retreat from the harsh realities she had uncovered represented 'nothing but resistance against accepting the reality of her conclusions concerning infantile life'.

Winnicott was certainly insistent that 'I know that babies and children scream and bite and kick and pull their mothers' hair'; and at one point provided '18 reasons why a mother hates her children, among which is "He is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave"'. Nevertheless, what has been called 'his identification with an ideal mother' could perhaps lead to a derivative idealisation of family life: indeed, arguably, with 'the theoretical icon of the mother and child Winnicott sometimes uses psychoanalysis to redescribe a traditional theology...psychoanalysis was incorporated into a Christian empiricist tradition'. Related to this may be the way 'Winnicott's work has been described as a flight from the erotic'. While Winnicott's stated aim was to give 'young mothers...support in their reliance on their natural tendencies', in practice idealisation of what he insisted was only the good enough mother might perhaps become another perfectionist yardstick for parents to be found wanting by.

A further criticism, linked to what may be seen as his Wordsworthian Romanticism, his cult of childhood, of continuity of growth and play, was the danger that 'Winnicottians become rigorously spontaneous' - perpetually applauding the way 'There was no compliant playing here!'.

From another standpoint, however, the problem was that Winnicott was too close to Klein. To the ego-psychologists, 'The English object-relations people (D. W. Winnicott...and others), who predate and foreshadow the Kohut and the Kernberg groups, are equally wrong-minded...and are tinged, to varying degrees, with the "Kleinian heresy"'. Similarly for Lacan, despite his personal respect for Winnicott, the latter was implicated in the 'contradiction between the pre-Oedipal intrigue, to which, in the opinion of certain of our modern analysts, the analytic relation can be reduced, and the fact that Freud was satisfied with having situated it in the position of the Oedipus complex...lead to a propedeutics of general infantilization.

Winnicott's 'own childhood experience of trying to make "my living" by keeping his mother alive' may have fed into his later concept of the False Self, and of how 'a threat of breakdown of the family structure... in some cases leads to a premature emotional growth and to a precocious independence and sense of responsibility... but this is not health, even if it has healthy features'. When he claimed 'I was sane, and through analysis and self-analysis I achieved some measure of insanity', it may have been to the experiential roots of much of his own theorising that, for better or worse, he was referring.

At the end of the day, Winnicott is one of the few twentieth-century analysts who, in stature, breadth (and minuteness) of observations, and theoretical fertility can perhaps legitimately be compared to Sigmund Freud: 'some genius analysts, such as Freud and Winnicott...learned naturally how to learn from their patients. I believe that the majority of ..therapists are more ordinary, sincere hard workers - not necessarily brilliant' - "good enough".