DW Winnicott’s Debt to and Divergence from Melanie Klein: A Psychoanalytic Genealogy

Abstract

Abstract: This is a two-part paper. Its second part assays the development of DW Winnicott’s conceptions relative to Melanie Klein’s, particularly after 1945, regarding areas such as infantile development, pathogenesis, diagnosis, and therapeutics. It then explores his alignments with and departures from her depressive position views. Finally, it examines his revision of her depressive position formulations. It does this particularly in relation to his proposition that infants dissociate from one another their experience of themselves and of their mother conditioned either by having interacted with her in ruthlessly intense states directed to her or when having been tenderly nurtured by her.