Winnicott on the Surprises of the Self

No investigation of the "messy self" would be complete without consideration of psychoanalytic thought, which has done so much to turn our attention to our surprising, com plicated, largely hidden insides. All the great psychoanalytic thinkers have their own contributions to make to the study of the self, but there is one who, I believe, has more to contribute than any other: Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and analyst who made psychoanalysis more flexible than it had been in the hands of Freud and Klein, a humanistic art of personal interpre tation rather than a would-be science, and who invented key concepts such as that of the "transitional object" and the "facili tating environment" that are at the heart of analytic practice today. Unlike Freud, Donald Winnicott is not a cultural icon, read in Great Books courses, revered and reviled.1 Unlike Jacques Lacan, he is not an intellectual cult figure, with a band of zealous disci ples and an impenetrable jargon.There is no school ofWinnicott, there are no courses in his methods. All this is as he wished it. Nobody was more skeptical of cults and the rigidity they induced. All his life he was obsessed with the freedom of the