Dimensions of Winnicott´s Revolutionary Program
INTERNATIONAL WINNICOTT ASSOCIATION (IWA)
2nd Paris Meeting of the International Research Group
on Winnicott´s Paradigm (IRG-WP)
Friday, June 2nd, 2017
Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne
23, rue Campagne-Première
75014 Paris
Topic: Dimensions of Winnicott´s Revolutionary Program
The proposal is to explore and discuss at this meeting different components of Winnicott´s paradigm, that is to say, his exemplars, theoretical commitments – guiding generalizations (theory of maturational processes, pathology), operational ontology (theory of human nature), research methods, values-instrumental commitments and clinical procedures. This can be done by direct textual and conceptual analysis or by comparison with components of other psychoanalytic paradigms.
Confirmed speakers
Elsa Oliveira Dias (Brazil)
Irene Borges Duarte (Portugal)
Leticia Minhot (Argentina)
Ofra Eshel (Israel)
Philippe Cabestan (France)
Zeljko Loparic (Brazil)
PROGRAMME
MORNING
Contributions in French
9h00-10h00 Philippe Cabestan
Donald W.Winnicott et la philosophie
Si l’on en croit sa bibliographie, Winnicott ne se risque guerre sur les terres de la philosophie. Sauf erreur de notre part, il n’a jamais écrit sur un philosophe et ses références sont essentiellement psychanalytique : Abraham, Balint, Bion, Ferenczi, Freud, etc. Cependant, la philosophie accorde une place particulière à l’œuvre de Winnicott dans la mesure où, en dépit de son caractère relativement peu systématique, celle-ci soulève des questions auxquelles celle-là tente également de répondre. Qu’il s’agisse de l’enfance, de l’angoisse, de l’imaginaire, du rapport à autrui, du soi et du faux soi, Winnicott est à chaque fois amené à interroger et réélaborer des notions anthropologiquement décisives. Que pouvons-nous retenir de ses recherches ? Telle est la question que nous voudrions aborder d’un point de vue phénoménologique.
10h00-11h00 Irene Borges Duarte
L’absence de projet dans l’expérience du temps. Heidegger, Winnicott et au-delà
L’expérience du temps, dans sa phénoménologie, implique la perception de continuités et de ruptures, d’ extensions et de distentions. Chez Heidegger, on parle d’un horizon temporel et d’ extases, d’ événement historique et d’ événement cairologique, Geschichte et Ereignis. Mais que se passe-t-il lorsque la dynamique vitale projective se coupe et le Dasein ne peut plus créer des possibilités? L’un de ses figurations pourrait être l’ennui, l’ expérience du présent continu. Mais ce n’est pas la seule façon d’ en faire l’expérience. L’idée d’espace potentiel de Winnicott pourrait permettre de mieux comprendre la richesse de vivre cet interrègne vital, dans lequel la vie s’ attarde, le temps suspendu mais pas absent, en attendant ou peut-être avec l’espoir silencieux du Novum. Ma communication, veut avancer un pas vers la compréhension de ces situations existentielles dont la temporalisation du futur n’est plus perçue comme telle.
11h00-11h30 Break/Pause
11h30-12h30 Elsa Oliveira Dias
Le vocabulaire de la révolution winnicottienne
Considérant qu´un nouveau paradigme exige la création d´une nouvelle langue (un nouveau léxique), je me propose à discuter la langue que Winnicott considère appropriée et qu´il utilise pour décrire ses découvertes revolutionaires sur la nature humaine et ses manifestations dans le temps, soit dans la santé soit dans la maladie. Bien que les textes de Winnicott sont délibérément écrits dans un anglais simple et courant, je vais montrer qu’il était extrêmement exigeant dans le choix des termes et des expressions. En même temps, Winnicott se refuse d’utiliser les termes du langage spéciulatif de la métasychologie freudienne (pulsions de vie et de mort, apareil psychique etc.) et introduit sa propre terminologie théorique, non spéculative et plus adequate à la descriptions des périodes et stages de maturation. Et quand il garde les termes consacrés de la psychanalyse traditionnelle, descriptifs ou classificatoirs (psychose, névrose, transfer etc.), il leurs donne un sens nouveau. Non rarement il se plaint de l’utilisation biaisée par certains commentateurs du vocabulaire qu’il a créé pour décrire de nouveaux phénomènes.
AFTERNOOM
Contributions in English
14h00-15h00 Ofra Eshel
Is a faculty member, and training and supervising analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA); co-founder, former coordinator and faculty member of the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Advanced Psychotherapists at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, and of the Israel Winnicott Center, and she is on the advisory board of the International Winnicott Association (IWA); founder and head of the post-graduate track “Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthroughs” (2016) at the advanced studies of the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University. She is book review editor of Sihot-Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy. Her papers were published in psychoanalytic journals and presented at national and international conferences. She was a visiting scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of North California (PINC, San Francisco, 2013), received the Leonard J. Comess Fund grant at the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP, Los Angeles, 2011), the David Hammond grant at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP, Boston, 2016), and awarded the 2013 Frances Tustin Memorial Prize, and the 2017 Symonds Prize in New York. She was featured in 2012 in Globes (Israel’s financial newspaper and magazine) as sixteenth of the fifty most influential women in Israel. She is in private practice in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Winnicott’s clinical paradigm, the unthinkable breakdown and the concept of clinical regression
Winnicott’s way of thinking, exploring, and practicing psychoanalysis over the years has consistently offered a revolutionary change in psychoanalysis. His core ideas of self-development and human subjectivity evolved out of very early infantile psychic processes and environmental mother-infant relatedness that precede object relationships, and these are powerfully applied to his revolutionary clinical thinking, with its emphasis on regression in the treatment of more disturbed patients. This clinical paradigm means moving experientially beyond the space-time confines of traditional clinical psychoanalysis to work with primal processes in the treatment situation and setting, so that the treatment process actualizes a new experiential possibility within a new psychic environment. Winnicott’s very important late papers, published posthumously, “Fear of breakdown” (1963?, published 1974), and its continuation “Psychology of madness” (1965), and “The concept of clinical regression compared with that of defence organization” (1967), addressthe disastrous impact of being broken down at the beginning of one’s life. The extreme primitive agony of early breakdown or madness is so unthinkable and “indescribably painful” that it cannot be experienced, and a new massive defense organization, displayed as the patient’s illness syndrome, must be constructed against it. The new clinical significance of these ideas is powerfully emphasized by Winnicott himself, from the very beginning of his ”breakdown” paper, and by Clare Winnicott (1974, 1980). It is, therefore, most interesting to see the way he connects this new late understanding with his radical model of regression to dependence and its healing quality in the treatment of severely disturbed patients, in his paper “The concept of clinical regression” (1967).
15h00-16h00 Leticia Minhot
She holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, a doctorate in philosophy from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas; she is a full professor at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Her area of expertise is epistemology of psychoanalysis and political philosophy of science. Author of the book: La mirada psicoanalítica. A Kuhnian analysis of Freud’s psychoanalysis. Compiler in different books, and author of numerous articles in the area. She is editor of the journal Representaciones. Journal of Studies on Representation in Art, Science and Philosophy.
Kuhn´s theory of paradigms today
Our objective delves into some elements of Kuhn’s historical and epistemological project. The aim is not an exegesis of Kuhn’s thought but, rather, a selection of components for the construction of the device from which we will read psychoanalysis in a Kuhnian sense. What is the Kuhnian history? How does this history articulate with its epistemology? Considering Hoyningen-Huene´s thesis (1946/1993) on Kuhn’s project -the plurality of phenomenal worlds-we are enabled to approach the characteristics of the rationality of our time and the place of psychoanalysis in it. If the conditions of possibility of true knowledge are historical, we are empowered to understand the contingency of our own phenomenal present world.
16h00-16h30 Break/Pause
16h30-17h30 Zeljko Loparic
Has a PhD in philosophy and since 1984 teaches philosophy and history of psychoanalysis at different universities in Brazil and abroad. In 2005 he founded, together with Elsa Oliveira Dias, the Brazilian Society of Winnicottian Psychoanalysis (SBPW). In 2013 he founded and was elected president of the International Winnicott Association (IWA). In 2014 he started teaching the Sino-Brazilian Training Course in Winnicottian Psychoanalysis in Beijing. He authored Heidegger Defendant (1990), Ethics and Finitude (1995), Heuristic Descartes (1997), Kant’s Transcendental Semantics (2000), On Responsibility (2003), and Heidegger (2004), Winnicote Jung (2014), Winnicott´s New Track (2017, forthcoming), co-edited several collective volumes, and published numerous papers in national and international journals on general philosophy of science (Carnap, Kuhn) and philosophy (mainly Kant and Heidegger) and history of psychoanalysis (Winnicott).
Elements of Winnicott´s Ontology
The purpose of the present paper is to identify and analyse some of the main universals of Winnicott´s theory of human nature-the ultimate subject-matter of psychoanalysis-such as essential aloneness, urge to exist, illusion of contact, dependence, experience of being, existential paradoxes, tendency towards integration, tendency towards de-integration, integrational (maturational) needs, personality structure and circular structure of life. The proposal will be made that these universals can be viewed as a scientific basis for the elaboration of a kind of philosophical anthropology. Well known traditional philosophical (Kant, Heidegger), religious (Upanishads) and literary (T. S. Eliot) reference points will be used to enrich the discussion.
