Reading Winnicott

In its first century, psychoanalysis has h nd several great thinkers, but f rom the author's viewpoint, only one great English-speaking writer: Donald Winnicott. Because style and content are so interdependent in Winnicott's w riting; his papers are not well served by a thematic reading aimed exclusiv ely at gleaning "what the paper is about." Such efforts often result in tri vial aphorisms. Winnicott, for the most part, does not USC language to nm i ve at conclusions; rather; he uses language to create experiences in readin g that are inseparable from the ideas he is presenting, or more accurately, the ideas he is playing with. The author offers a reading of Winnicott's (1945) "Primitive Emotional Deve lopment," a work containing the seeds of virtually all the major contributi ons to psychoanalysis that Winnicott would make over the course of the succ eeding twenty-six years of his life. The present author demonstrates the in terdependence of the life of the ideas being developed and the life of the writing in this seminal paper Of Winnicott's. What "Primitive Emotional Dev elopment" has to offer to a psychoanalytic render cannot be said in any oth er way (which is to say that the writing is extraordinarily resistant to pa raphrase). It has beds this author's experience-which he hopes to convey to the reader-that an awareness of the way the language is working in Winnico tt's writings significantly enhances what can be learned from reading them.