Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care

Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care

Author: Joanna Kellond

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-03-20

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 3030914372

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This book explores the significance of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s ideas for contemporary debates about care. Locating Winnicott in relation to a range of fields, including psychology, philosophy, sociology, critical theory and feminist theory, it examines the implications of his thinking for understanding and transforming the relationship between care and society. Winnicott was unique amongst psychoanalysts for the emphasis he placed on care in the development of subjectivity. The book unpacks Winnicott’s understanding of care and assesses its relevance for conceptions of social responsibility, justice and transformation. In a world where care is in crisis, how might we theorise the conditions necessary for the development of caring subjectivities, and is it possible to infer a relationship between those conditions and progressive social change? This unique book will be of interest to readers in psychosocial studies, politics and anyone concerned with thinking about the relationship between care and social transformation.


D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory

D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory

Author: Matthew H. Bowker

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-01-31

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1137575336

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In this volume, the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is set in conversation with some of today’s most talented psychodynamically-sensitive political thinkers. The editors and contributors demonstrate that Winnicott’s thought contains underappreciated political insights, discoverable in his reflections on the nature of the maturational process, and useful in working through difficult impasses confronting contemporary political theorists. Specifically, Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory and practice offer a framework by which the political subject, destabilized and disrupted in much postmodern and contemporary thinking, may be recentered. Each chapter in this volume, in its own way, grapples with this central theme: the potential for authentic subjectivity and inter-subjectivity to arise within a nexus of autonomy and dependence, aggression and civility, destructiveness and care. This volume is unique in its contribution to the growing field of object-relations-oriented political and social theory. It will be of interest to political scientists, psychologists, and scholars of related subjects in the humanities and social sciences.


The Political Clinic

The Political Clinic

Author: Carolyn Laubender

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2024-07-02

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 0231560540

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For decades, psychoanalysis has provided essential concepts and methodologies for critical theory and the humanities and social sciences. But it is also, inseparably, a clinical practice and technique for treatment. In what ways is clinical practice significant for critical thought? What conceptual resources does the clinic hold for us today? Carolyn Laubender examines cases from Britain and its former colonies to show that clinical psychoanalytic practice constitutes a productive site for novel political thought, theorization, and action. She delves into the clinical work of some of the British Psychoanalytic Society’s most influential practitioners—including Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wulf Sachs, D. W. Winnicott, Thomas Main, and John Bowlby—exploring how they developed distinctive and politically salient practices. Laubender argues that these figures transformed the clinic into a laboratory for reimagining race, gender, sexuality, childhood, nation, and democracy. By taking up the clinic as both a site of inquiry and realm of theoretical innovation, she traces how political concepts such as authority, reparation, colonialism, decolonization, communalism, and security at once informed and were reformed by each analyst’s work. While psychoanalytic scholarship has typically focused on its intellectual, social, and political effects outside of the clinic, this interdisciplinary book combines history with feminist and decolonial social theory to recast the clinic as a necessarily politicized space. Challenging common assumptions that psychoanalytic practice is or should be neutral, apolitical, and objective, The Political Clinic also considers what progressive clinical praxis can offer today.


The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida

The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida

Author: Richard Ganis

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2010-12-28

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 0739150111

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This book considers whether there is a legitimate or even necessary place for the perspective of 'care' when addressing questions of universal justice. To this end, it examines two major frameworks of contemporary moral philosophy_Jürgen Habermas's model of discourse ethics and Jacques Derrida's deconstructive ethics of radical singularity_in which the contrasting standpoints of communicative reciprocation and care for the absolute otherness of the other are respectively prioritized.


The Collected Works of D.W. Winnicott

The Collected Works of D.W. Winnicott

Author: Donald Woods Winnicott

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-12-31

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0190271434

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Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) was one of Britain's leading psychoanalysts and pediatricians. The author of some of the most enduring theories of the child and of child analysis, he coined terms such as the "good enough mother" and the "transitional object" (known to most as the security blanket). Winnicott's work is still used today by child and family therapists, social workers, teachers, and psychologists, and his papers and clinical observations are routinely studied by trainees in psychiatry and clinical psychology. Beyond the expected audiences of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, Winnicott also wrote for parents, teachers, social workers, childcare specialists, pediatricians, psychologists, art and play therapists, and others in the field of child development. Now, for the first time, virtually all of Winnicott's writings are presented chronologically in 12 volumes, edited and annotated by leading Winnicott scholars. The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott brings together letters, clinical case reports, child consultations, psychoanalytic articles, and papers, including previously unpublished works on topics of continuing interest to contemporary readers (such as delinquency, antisocial behavior, corporal punishment, and child care). The Collected Works begins with an authoritative General Introduction by editors Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson, while each of the volumes features an original introduction examining that volume's major themes and written by an international Winnicott scholar and psychoanalyst. Throughout The Collected Works, editorial annotations provide historical context and background information of scholarly and clinical value. The final volume contains new and illuminating appendices, comprehensive bibliographies of Winnicott's publications and letters, documentation of his lectures and broadcasts, and a selection of his drawings. This extraordinary publication will be an essential resource for Winnicott admirers the world over and those interested in the history and origins of the fields of child development and psychoanalysis.


Home is where We Start from

Home is where We Start from

Author: Donald Woods Winnicott

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780393306675

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One of the most gifted and creative psychoanalysts of his generation, D. W. Winnicott made lasting contributions to our understanding of the minds of children.


The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

Author: Donald W. Winnicott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-24

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0429921411

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Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was trained in paediatrics, a profession that he practised to the end of his life, in particular at the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital. He began analysis with James Strachey in 1923, became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1935, and twice served as its President. He was also a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the British Psychological Society. The collection of papers that forms The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment brings together Dr Winnicott’s published and unpublished papers on psychoanalysis and child development during the period 1957-1963. It has, as its main theme, the carrying back of the application of Freud’s theories to infancy. Freud showed that psycho-neurosis has its point of origin in the interpersonal relationships of the first maturity, belonging to the toddler age. Dr Winnicott explores the idea that mental hospital disorders relate to failures of development in infancy. Without denying the importance of inheritance, he has developed the theory that schizophrenic illness shows up as the negative of processes that can be traced in detail as the positive processes of maturation in infancy and early childhood.


Winnicott and Labor’s Eclipse of Life

Winnicott and Labor’s Eclipse of Life

Author: Nathan Gerard

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 1000999831

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Nathan Gerard draws upon the pathbreaking insights of a pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott to offer a new set of ideas in the novel domain of contemporary work life and its discontents. Locating Winnicott within a broad landscape of critical scholarship that dissects work’s perils, the book positions Winnicott as both a radical critic and creative advocate for building a different kind of work life—one that might make room for the presence of self. By shuffling the discourse on neoliberal subjectivity to reclaim what Winnicott calls “unit status” of the separate self, Gerard differentiates Winnicott from the relational tradition by advocating for Winnicott’s non-relational aspects. Through such analysis, the book reveals how work and home have become two sides of the same impoverished coin, each contributing to a legitimately “bad environment” that perpetuates self-absence and annihilates one’s unique sense of “feeling real” and alive. Winnicott and Labor’s Eclipse of Life will be of interest to readers of Winnicott and psychoanalysis, organization and management studies, and anyone hoping to deepen their engagement with the dynamics of contemporary work life.


Public Things

Public Things

Author: Bonnie Honig

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 0823276422

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In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of “pursuing in common the objects of common desires,” Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be “gathered up” refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of “transitional objects”—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott—both theorists of livenesss—underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.