Ruthless Winnicott: The role of ruthlessness in psychoanalysis and political protest

Description

Ruthless Winnicott is an extended exploration of the role of ruthlessness in psychic development. That survival is of no use unless it is preceded by a ruthless attack is one of D. W. Winnicott’s most resonant paradoxes. The book links this with the search for subjective freedom for those traumatized by colonialism, and in doing so draws on the work of Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary psychoanalytic thinker Frantz Fanon. Sally Swartz examines essential pieces of Winnicott’s work on ruthlessness as central to the emergence of concern for the Other. She illustrates, with clinical examples, ways in which the ruthless use of the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic space allows the patient either to enter fully into a process that allows growth, or to defend ruthlessly against the anxieties provoked by psychic change. Ruthless Winnicott also maps decolonial challenges to psychoanalytic theory, and the role of ruthlessness in protest movements demanding radical subjective change. Swartz’s exploration of ruthlessness as both zest and defense in individual development and in protest movements illuminates processes of psychological collision and change. It traces links between individual trauma and collective turbulence, and maps ways in which ruthlessness is essential to subjective change. Ruthless Winnicott will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars of colonialism, decolonization and post-colonialism. Ruthless Winnicott- Front Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: ruthless Winnicott and the decolonial project Notes on patient confidentiality, clinical vignettes and terminology References Chapter 1: We want to be eaten “Hullo object!” “I destroyed you.” “I love you.”The creation of externality Muddles Ruthlessness in the service of change His majesty and the mouse – the ruthlessness of entitlement and compliance Ruthless independence The ruthlessness of the fussy eater Absent-mindedness Ruthless attack Becoming orange peel: the therapist’s ruth and survival of ruthlessness Using ruth and ruthlessness in thinking diagnostically Note References Chapter 2: Ruthlessness and idealization Idealization as a ruthless defence against taking in and being taken in The activist The stockbroker Matters of technique Inch by inch with the activist Sparring with the stockbroker Truth breaking in: the sad consequences of being real Notes References Chapter 3: Having a good peep: false selves and use of the therapeutic space False/secret Secrets, ruthlessness and ways beyond Tickets to the peep show: the curator The accountant Voyeurism and food Note References Chapter 4: The weeping couch Turbulence and trouble Turbulence at the University of Cape Town Trouble Ruthlessness and rupture Conclusion: the weeping couch References Chapter 5: Masks, slipping Being blown to smithereens The place of recognition in the colonial situation Winnicott, Fanon and survival The “primitive edge” of protest Seeing double and living through Note References Chapter 6: Rhodes, falling Rhodes Must Fall Symbols are not the third Shackville Exhibiting #RMF Creating a third space: memory and art in question Repetition of trauma, ruthlessness and the idea of a university Conclusion Notes References Chapter 7: Ruth and the missing middle Protests in bounded communities Constituting the missing middle Encounters Reflections on the middle as third Note References Chapter 8: Decolonizing psychoanalysis Liable to inherit A colonial situation Centre and periphery Revisiting psychoanalytic universals: the “primitive” Revisiting psychoanalytic universals: the place of gender Conclusion References Index