Donald Winnicott

bond.

But at the same time, actually, what that bond is doing is validating fostering encouraging creating the context for a kind of autonomy um i mean i suppose you could say donald winnicott's concept of the child who's playing alone in the presence of the mother encapsulates that sort of paradox that if there's a kind of external feeling of being held and validated and secure then you can be yourself and rely on yourself and you can be your own secure base if you like so I'm not sure I mean I totally see what you're saying And even, you know, say, and I'm not familiar, in fact, there is a phrase, isn't there, which I've tried to remember and don't remember for this form of therapy, which has become very popular.

And my son, it's quite cute, who's another psychiatrist, was telling me about it the other day.

But in a

The movement of these figures and the shapes they make are taken from images of the artist's own childhood play.

Through this activity, the Minotaur is brought into proximity with psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott's thinking on the holding environment and the role of aggression in development of the self.

For Winnicott, the holding environment provides the conditions in which an emerging self can experience the world without being overwhelmed by it.

It is a space that does not seek to eliminate difficult impulses, but one in which they can be survived and integrated.

Through this environment, the self can encounter and test the external world through a vitality that understands aggression as more than simply destructive.

So psychoanalysis has evolved a lot since its original Freudian development.

Some important people in that evolution have been Eric Erickson, Melanie Klein, Harry Steck Sullivan, Donald Winnicott, contemporary people in the relational movement like Stephen Mitchell, the self-psychology movement, which is very much about self-esteem by Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg's work, on internalized family dynamics in patients and psychoanalytic general technique has changed over time.

When I was first trained, some supervisors put a lot of emphasis on trying to be a blank screen because the idea was if you were not giving the patient much information about yourself, the transferences would be easier to see.

You know, if you said rather little and the patient immediately assumed you were critical, it would bring out the transference.

It was very intense, but it was disrupted.

And that person needs to understand that they are, you know, there's a wonderful sentence from Donald Winnicott, great psychoanalyst, who said, the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.

And the key thing is, it's been forgotten.

You forgot the catastrophe.