Keywords: Psychoanalysis; Freud; Winnicott; Transitional object; Holding; Squiggle; Psyche-Soma; Illusion
“Deploying margins. Near DWWinnicott. And beyond”
by Paolo Fabozzi
(Franco Angeli, 2024)
Review by Giuseppe Di Chiara
Interesting book, this one by Paolo Fabozzi, mainly for two reasons. The first is that of an accurate revision of Winnicott’s work, which is thus removed from a centrifugal drift and
reported in the central path of psychoanalysis and its evolution. The second is the consequent
growing reworking of the clinical and theoretical models of psychoanalysis, with a careful eye
to the Italian reality of the psychoanalytic panorama.
The conspicuous Introduction gives an overview of the volume, recalling its origin in the
considerations made on the encounter between Winnicottian concepts and clinical experiences, thus succeeding
to straighten out some misunderstandings, such as that of the real, historical and environmental mother, and to
confirm Winnicott’s discoveries, playing, knowing how to resist the aggressiveness of the object, the
first meeting with the other, the role of countertransference, the importance of psychoanalytic theater (22),
Winnicott’s independence, and his ability to escape radical maximalism with his own
suffocating reductionism.
Winnicott’s is indicated as “a silent and radical future revolution” in the first
chapter that contains a masterful exposition of the roots of Winnicottian thought: lo
theatrical performance in a patient’s dream (37), the reevaluation of the Freudian Junktim of theory
with clinic (43). Not a radically environmentalist Winnicott, but rather the underlining
of the effectiveness of the unconscious exchanges between what Riolo called “the two travelers on the road
of analysis” (45).
This is followed by a successful historical and scientific review of the Controversial years
discussions and the development of Winnicottian thought, which relies on learning from the patient and
from human relationships. Here we find a careful examination by Fabozzi of that term used in such a way
detail from Winnicott, illusion. It is approached as an overlap between a perception
of external reality and an internal representation – which reminds me of Money-Kyrle’s preconceptions,
and then Bion. The development of the analytical process is determined by “a network of unconscious movements
between subject and object that mark the progress of the analytical process” (62), just as they mark the
development of the child’s psyche.
Early development of the child to which the third chapter is dedicated, which analyzes “States
early stages of being”, “illusion and the subjective object” and the “birth of the self”. Winnicott does not propose
a strong and concluded theory, but it follows observational paths and conjectures. Report your own
dissatisfaction with the term narcissism, as commonly used (68) and highlights
“a fundamental and unalterable intrinsic solitude” (69), assisted and supported by the object
maternal (70), with the propulsive aspect of “primary maternal concern” (71).
The fourth chapter is dedicated to the crucial concept of playing, used by Winnicott. I notice that in
the entire volume playing is used mainly in the sense of playing, and is not compared to
Freudian Spielen, which includes theatrical representation. It certainly derives from its use
does in the “playroom”, a free association not of words, but of materials, in which he is al
work – I would propose – an early “psychoanalytic builder”. There is a poetic description of the use
of the game and its meaning, its relevance, its spontaneous decline in the narrative and
in the representation.
The fifth chapter is dedicated to the “Use of an object between destructiveness and creativity”. Chapter
difficult, but very relevant. The work was presented by Winnicott in November 1968 to
colleagues in New York. It was “a legendary scientific evening”! (107). Probably with a root in deep transference movements. It is central to Winnicott’s argument to bring the object, the
mother first, outside of omnipotence. There is talk of “a physiological experience of omnipotence”
(111), through which the child learns to use the object (108). It seems to me that it is about
transition from an omnipotence, which runs in vain, to an effective power, which requires the child to
his maximum effort, to create “an object completely different from me, capable of nourishing me, but
above all endowed with an autonomous life, independent of me and my control, an entity in itself
instant” (112). It seems that it is the subject, the child, who teaches the object, the mother, for example
be like that! And here Fabozzi asks himself: “why doesn’t Winnicott resort to his father figure?” (ibid.) Lo
will resume later. Here he concludes that we are not in the presence of a simple acceptance of
reality but rather faced with “an active process of establishing the object as external to one’s own
self,” thereby creating a shared world of reality (113). A mutual modulation between
child and mother who creates a functional development dyad.
The second part of the work is dedicated to aggression, the origin of which is identified in
motility. The term “destructiveness” is inadequate for Winnicott (115). It’s a potential destroyer,
which is not destruction (117), a destruction that does not destroy (126). Winnicott stays with his
“indispensable criticism of the Freudian construct of the death drive”, as well as the Kleinian one of
innate envy (108). It is clear that work is required for the mother to tune into these
register! As well as the psychoanalyst, who to succeed must practice a “tempered subjectivity”,
mature, it must know how to be “alive and real”. At the end Fabozzi takes up the theme of his father, of whom
Winnicott had an intuition about its function when he wrote two months after the seminar
New Yorker, “The Use of an Object in the Context of the Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion.” But it was
an intuition that he struggled to carry forward (128).
The following chapters develop that “Beyond”, which is in the title of the book. Illuminated by
Winnicottian discoveries explore frontier areas of psychoanalytic research.
The sixth chapter tells of “Raids, retreats, disappearances. Explorations between narcissism and
destructiveness”. In the beginning a summary of psychotic and traumatic experiences of mythology to put into
light how, following Laplanche, the small man, like original humanity, has no
tools to govern all this. Individuals and corporations would guard a fearful fund and
ungovernable, which is transmitted over time. Fabozzi also proposes the existence of an environment
absolutely unfavorable, a pestiferous environment (136). So the defenses are absences and break-ins, which
in the end they cause disconnections, withdrawals, disappearances. Only after a lot of care work do they reappear
elements of Being (as in writings by Steiner, Colombi and De Masi). Fabozzi questions himself and yes
engages in a critical review of some Freudian cornerstones. He doubts the death drive,
like Winnicott (143); finds the Freudian metaphor of the Amoeba for primary narcissism unfortunate;
indicates as an accomplice to this unhappiness the Freudian “principle of constancy”, for which the psyche
tends to get rid of any stimulus. Everything against the object. And it rightly reminds us as another
reality is shown to us by infant observation. He also compares himself with Bion, indicating the risk that
he sometimes pretends to be “an analyst who knows too much” and who does not make use of negative capacity.
(144). The chapter concludes with the clinical evidence of the reappearance of those fragments of “being”
in the patient’s contact with the analyst, who manages to “be the object that also has the capacity to
to be”, according to Winnicott (150).
And it is with the “analyst’s mind and clinical facts” that the seventh chapter opens on
“Genesis of interpretation”, in which the author studies “the complex relationship between clinic, theory and
technique that presides over the genesis of interpretation” (154). Realize the analytical situation “not
in a frame of mere symmetry” (159), in which the person of the analyst, through his analysis
personnel and their training, is active and present” (155), with a view to continuous development and
updating theories and techniques, without losing the achievements made, but adding new ones. Yes
he calls this of the analyst “tempered subjectivity” (156), which is an expansion of receptivity,
capturing the most diverse messages from patients with which they express “an unconscious request for
analytical work” (how the baby expresses the request for maternal activity). The patient tries to
be “confirmed in one’s identity” (157). (Function that the analyst performs through the
own ‘psychoanalytic narrator’, Di Chiara, 2022, 2024). In analytic listening, the analyst collaborates with the patient who seeks the meeting (158), using the “function
signal” of the countertransference (159), positioning itself in the “intermediate area”, distant and different from the
‘oracular knowledge’, but also “from a relativism that results in the symmetrization between patient and
analyst” (160). This is how it is possible to “host foreignness” (161), using suitable techniques
listening (162). And here we come to interpretation in the theatrical sense, to giving life to characters and
events, recalling the Freudian Phantasieren (163-164).
The exploration of the unrepressed unconscious has become current in contemporary psychoanalysis. Fabozzi does not approach it as a crisis in the techniques of psychoanalysis, but, on the contrary, with their improvement. It is such because he was not removed by taking away his words, but because he never had the words and they must be given to him. The eighth chapter is dedicated to it.
Fabozzi indicates two particular forms of defense used by patients, which are very incisive on the
countertransference, the ‘silent’ one and the ‘noisy’ one. And he gives a clinical example of this
really interesting. The patient described throws into sensational outbursts, triggered by a
intervention by the analyst on the patient’s free association, who says: “yesterday I was uncomfortable
in the company of a couple!” And the analyst says: “It has to do with sexuality!” After
difficult crossing of the storm, the patient ends up telling the story of how she slept in the room
parents’ bedroom from birth to age six, when a brother was born.
In the ninth, final chapter, four surprising clinical situations are presented,
characterized by an accurate description of countertransference experiences. With them the proposal of
divide countertransference into three clinical and theoretical forms, also distinguishable by their effects on the
psychic functioning and on the analyst’s psyche-soma. The first is the countertransference “that conveys
mostly repressed contents in the sense of P. Heimann” and which “is based on Freudian intuition
of communication between the patient’s unconscious and the analyst’s unconscious” (201), The second is the
“countertransference attributable to projective identification, which conveys split contents and is based on
a channel in which the exchange takes place between a subject and an object” (ibid.). And a third type “in which it comes
transmitted the way in which the primary environment spread and pervaded and impregnated the child
during its states of quiet and potentially physiological fusion with the environment” (ibid.). Could be,
this third type of countertransference, responding to a transference of “ocean feeling”, hence Freud
did he stay away? (202). In this case a trace of the primary environmental situation
it would come back to life in the analysis room!
