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(p. 393) Comments on My Paper ‘The Use of an Object’ 

(p. 393) Comments on My Paper ‘The Use of an Object’
Chapter:
(p. 393) Comments on My Paper ‘The Use of an Object’
Author(s):

Donald W. Winnicott

DOI:
10.1093/med:psych/9780190271404.003.0076
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date: 16 January 2021

Winnicott comments on the responses of colleagues in the New York Psychoanalytic Society to his paper ‘The Use of an Object’. He points out the developmental growth in this area of ‘object use’ for certain patients who need to ‘destroy their object in fantasy and see it survives in reality’. He also states that what here appears as ‘destructive’ in actuality is the vitality and energy of what it means to be alive. Through clinical work in this area, the analyst may become a real object, existing outside the patient’s omnipotent fantasises, something that is not usually possible in cases of more acute mental illness.

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