D. W. Winnicott and Political Theory

Reviewed by: D. W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject ed. by Matthew H. Bowker and Amy Buzby Lucas Charafeddine Bulamah (bio) D. W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject Matthew H. Bowker and Amy Buzby, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 382 pages. A quick glance at the first page of the largest psychoanalytical literature database, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP-Web), reveals something interesting: on the list of the most read papers are, from first to third, Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena, Hate in the Counter-transference, and The Theory of Parent-Infant Relationship. All can now be considered classics written by Donald Woods Winnicott, who is also listed in the ninth position, with Fear of Breakdown. Many hypotheses can help us understand the long-lasting predominance of the main representative of the British middle-group of psychoanalysts. It is safe to say that Winnicott's ideas regarding subjective development, the role of maternal care, the nature and function of transitional objects and potential space, false and true selves, among many others, are anything but dated. Their clinical significance seems to be both well settled and unquestionably expanding. Like most pioneer psychoanalysts, moreover, Winnicott's range of interests was not restricted only to the therapeutic features of the Freudian discovery. Especially in his later years, he was inclined to apply his insights on human development, relationships, and subjectivity to a field that can loosely be termed "political." However, Winnicott's explicit and potential contributions for political reflection have mostly been underappreciated, deemed either too naïve or obscured by an unappealing optimism. So, despite its ouverture character, the volume organized by Matthew Bowker and Amy Buzby, Donald Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject, seems to be a strong push in the direction of what David McIvor calls in the book a "Winnicottian turn in contemporary political theory" (p. 208), a movement that seems to be already happening. We can see clearly in the Introduction a polemic emerging against a certain doxa that [End Page 89] stems from the academic predominance of what Bowker and Buzby synthesize as "discourses of the disruption, decentering, and even 'death' of the subject" (p. 3). This doxa, vividly experienced by myself in prolific psychoanalytic academical circles in Brazil, seems to be organized around a reaction against modern conceptions of the subject, including the very idea of a subject and its necessity. If contemporary political and ethical reflections have discovered and usefully employed psychoanalysis in their efforts, it has for the large part been through the use of theorists aligned with what is usually deemed "postmodern" or "post-structuralist," mainly by readings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Laplanche, along with French intellectuals usually associated to tragic and structuralist thought currents and styles. Language, excess, otherness, the uncanny, castration and, of course, the Unconscious, all seem to displace the subject as the basis of a highly influential ethical imperative. Adding "recentering the subject" as a subtitle to the book announces the polemic efforts of the editors. Whether Winnicott's reflections would fit this "recentering" of the subject while still remaining on the grounds of psychoanalysis is up for discussion, but the editors rely on a striking argument to counter the parameters put forth by the aforementioned academic doxa. Considering what they term an apologia for the failure to be, Bowker and Buzby argue that discourses that rely on subjective fragmentation make a considerably harmful mistake in promoting the primacy of otherness, subjective undoing, and apologizing for our own being. The aetiology, so to speak, of these discourses would be a "defense against the possibility, or, in Winnicottian language, the potentiality, of subjective becoming" (p. 13). This powerful case against postmodern and post-structuralist dominance of the intellectual ethical and political ethos is provocative, to say the least. For example, if these discourses stem, as Bowker and Buzby argue, from depressive guilt, would it imply that their massive adoption and popularity at academic and intellectual circuits has at its basis a kind of social and institutional disposition for depressive guilt? If so, what would be its historical and cultural origins? This is only one short example of a kindled interest in the Winnicottian

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