BEYOND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE: AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EGO PSYCHOLOGY OF D. W. WINNICOTT.
Item
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Title
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BEYOND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE: AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EGO PSYCHOLOGY OF D. W. WINNICOTT.
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Identifier
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AAI8515646
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identifier
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8515646
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Creator
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MEZAN, PETER.
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Contributor
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Steven Ellman
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Clinical
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Abstract
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D. W. Winnicott occupies an ambiguous position in psychoanalysis. Usually regarded as one of the originators of the British school of object relations theory, he himself considered his work a contribution to ego psychology and as no more than a legitimate extension of classical theory. Moreover, while his clinical and technical contributions have been widely influential, the theory of ego development underlying them has remained only poorly understood or appreciated. My intent is to give his theoretical work a more systematic scrutiny than it has yet received and to place it in historical context both in relation to Freud and to some of the current major theoretical controversies. Winnicott is among the few theoreticians seriously to examine the implications of Freud's positing an original undifferentiated state (of id and ego). His work consists of an attempt to conceptualize the nature of this intrinsically obscure and paradoxical domain and the mode of psychic functioning developing out of it. This conceptualization, I maintain, recommends a highly original way of looking at some of the most fundamental and problematic issues for psychoanalytic theory: (1) the problem of reality, whether it is created or found, and what is the developmental relationship between reality-testing and the sense or feeling of reality; (2) the problem of the subject, or the relation between the self as a relatively sophisticated phenomenon and the underlying feeling or sense of self; (3) the problem of an adequate psychoanalytic concept of health, which, in any but the negative form of the notion of an absence of illness, the theory has sorely lacked; and (4) the problem of ordinary creativity, play, and imagination (the creativity of everyday life), for which the traditional concept of sublimation has long been perceived to be deficient. Winnicott's contributions, I believe, involve a quite new conceptualization of psychic functioning, amounting to the addition of a third principle of mental functioning to the two delineated by Freud, which Winnicott calls the transitional or intermediate area of experience. My sense overall is that the theoretical point of view Winnicott develops is pivotal and that his psychology of the ego at the stage of primary narcissism represents a potentially unifying theoretical position, coming in precisely at the interstices between the vying psychologies of drive, ego, object relations, and self.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
