Winnicott on Jung- Destruction, Creativity and the Unrepressed Unconscious

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2011, 56, 56–75

Winnicott on Jung: destruction, creativity
and the unrepressed unconscious
William Meredith-Owen, Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK
Abstract: This paper considers Winnicott’s critique of Jung, principally expressed in his
review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which asserts that Jung’s creative contribution
to analysis was constrained by his failure to integrate his ‘primitive destructive impulses’,
subsequent to inadequate early containment. It is argued that although Winnicott’s
`
diagnosis illuminates Jung’s shadow, particularly his constraints vis-a-vis
the repressed
Freudian unconscious, it fails to appreciate the efficacy of the compensatory containment
Jung found in the collective unconscious.
This enigmatic relationship between destruction and creativity—so central to late
Winnicott—is illuminated by Matte Blanco’s bi-logic, and further explored in relation
to William Blake. Winnicott’s personal resolution through his Jung-inspired ‘splitting
headache’ dream of destruction—previously considered in this Journal by Morey (2005)
and Sedgwick (2008)—is given particular attention.
Key words: Blake, destructive impulses, Jung, Matte Blanco, unrepressed unconscious,
Winnicott

Introduction
Well into his last decade, though still working vigorously despite his heart
attacks, Winnicott had his powerful ‘splitting headache’ dream of destruction
in which he experienced being cured of a lifelong malady. The dream was
threefold: first there was absolute destruction and he was destroyed, then
there was absolute destruction of which he was the agent, finally his ‘waking’
acknowledgement within the dream of his role in all three parts allowed
him to conclude that now ‘There was no dissociation . . . this felt immensely
satisfactory’. He attributed this dream to his immersion in Jung’s autobiography
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and he recorded it, appropriately enough, in
a letter to Michael Fordham in which he makes explicit reference to Jung,
asserting ‘as the dream flowed over me before I quite became awake (I became
aware) that I was dreaming a dream for Jung, and for some of my patients, as
well as for myself’ (Winnicott 1964).
So, clearly, Winnicott’s belief was that the resolution experienced in his
dream would have addressed Jung’s basic fault as well, which he goes on
to define as his ‘lack of contact with his own primitive destructive impulses’
0021-8774/2011/5601/56


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2011, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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(Winnicott 1964). For Winnicott this was a most serious critique, though here
of course also a self-criticism; for it was in just these ‘primitive destructive
impulses’ that Winnicott maintained lay the energizing drivers of creativity
and the ‘True Self’. It is a typically Winnicottian paradox that this charge be
levelled at two of the most creative minds of their respective eras: I endeavour
to reconcile this contradiction by drawing on Matte Blanco’s (1975) concept
of the unrepressed unconscious, which, I will argue, Winnicott was striving
towards his own idiosyncratic version of in his last years under the stimulus of
his engagement with Jung.
A bi-logical perspective
Jungians might well assume that Matte Blanco’s unrepressed unconscious is a
psycho-analytic analogue of the collective unconscious of analytical psychology.
Whilst there is indeed considerable territorial overlap—e.g., the unknowability
of the archetypes per se—there are clinically important differences of emphasis
that a brief overview of Matte Blanco’s schema will illuminate.
Essentially bi-logic proposes that there are two dynamics at work simultaneously in the ordering of our experience, the one asymmetric, geared towards
discrimination of difference and associated with developing consciousness,
the other symmetric, geared towards dissolution of difference and associated
with unconsciousness and/or universal identity. Matte Blanco thus expands
Freud’s original insight that dream ‘logic’ displays the ‘5 characteristics of
the unconscious’—displacement, non-contradiction, condensation etc.—and
elucidates and evolves its symmetricizing structure.
So at one extreme we would have an absolutely symmetrical experience of
pure ‘Being’—as in the absence of dimensions no ‘happening’ is possible—for
instance, mystical union of which nothing can be said, or utter oblivion. For
schematic purposes this may be designated Stratum 5. At Stratum 4 affect would
begin its primary differentiation—the emergence of attraction and repulsion,
love and hate (and this is the area that came to pre-occupy the late Winnicott).
As we move towards Stratum 3 unfolding differentiation has constellated in
structures like Jungian archetypes or Kleinian ‘bedrock’. At Stratum 3 selfconsciousness and initially rather concrete thinking emerges (‘I am a tiger’),
whilst at Stratum 2 confidently discreet identity and metaphor becomes possible
(‘I feel like a tiger’). Stratum 1 would accommodate the pure thought of science
etc.
This bi-logical structure takes on a deeper resonance with the realization
that the magnetic pole of affect is symmetrical, whilst that of thought is
asymmetrical. Thus a strong emotion—fear, love, hate—will tend to saturate all
experience (dissolving differentiation), and threaten to overwhelm: conversely,
affect that can be held in mind can be assimilated and refined. Pari passu thought
that is too divorced from affect becomes mere ‘thinkating’ (the modus operandi
of the ‘False Self’). Hence the emphasis on containment allowing energizing

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affect into mind where it can fuel and integrate with a conscious sense of
identity. Uncontained and unassimilated affect remains highly symmetrical as it
has not been able to emerge into asymmetry and thought and might therefore be
better regarded clinically as ‘dissociated’ components of an unrepressed rather
than a repressed unconscious.
This overly condensed survey is merely to orientate the reader to my sense
of Matte Blanco’s relevance to the theme of this paper – for a fuller and more
authoritative exposition please refer to Richard Carvalho’s earlier contributions
to this Journal (Carvalho 2006, 2007). The pertinence here is that Winnicott
regarded both Jung and himself as dissociated, and I will argue that much of
Winnicott’s later writing reaches back to some prior phase (pre-repression) that
he instinctively felt to be the core of the True Self, and whose necessarily assertive
drive (‘primitive destructive impulses’) needed to be assimilated (having been
inhibited in the infant/child’s early environment) if a rich relational life was
to ensue. Winnicott intuitively realized that the key problem was with affect
not having been able to come into mind in the first place rather than it having
been pushed out (repression): his attempt to leapfrog back to some postulated
‘primary unity’ is very analogous to Jung’s concern with regression/re-birth and
reparative immersion in the collective. Matte Blanco’s unrepressed unconscious
implicitly underpins both men’s endeavour: had Winnicott had the concept
available his appraisal of Jung and of his contribution to psycho-analysis might
have been more rounded, less coloured by his own shadow.

The context of Winnicott’s dream of destruction
The challenge of addressing this enigmatic dream has already been taken up
with some style in recent issues of this Journal by Morey (2005) who is
primarily concerned with vindicating the maintenance of an archetypal rather
than reductive vertex, and Sedgwick (2008) who is especially good on the almost
symbiotic relationship between the two men.
The whole process of reviewing and immersing himself in Jung’s psyche became, as
has been noted, a therapeutic activity for Winnicott. So through his contact with
Jung—Jung ostensibly possessing psychological splits that match those right at the
centre of Winnicott’s psyche and fantasy—Winnicott got split open and, as a result,
got to the healing he needed, which corresponded to the healing he felt Jung needed.
(Sedgwick 2008)

This passage is the culmination of an absolutely absorbing few pages
(‘Winnicott’s journey with Jung’) in which Sedgwick tracks the remarkable
parallels which had led Rodman (2003), Winnicott’s biographer, to suggest
that Winnicott experienced Jung as his ‘twin’: both suffered from depressed
mothers, both had prophetic/visionary dreams and aspirations, both aspired to
be the gentile heir-apparent to Freud.

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Whatever healing Winnicott experienced through his Jung-stirred dream
bore fruit in his final contributions to psychoanalysis, notably his ‘Use of an
Object’ paper. But here, rather anticlimactically after having set the scene so
wonderfully, Sedgwick declares himself baffled, concluding by wittily returning
Winnicott’s own haughty dismissal of Jungian jargon back on himself: ‘I cannot
be communicated with in this language’. This is a shame: for we need to
immerse ourselves in the idiom of the late Winnicott to fully appreciate the
role of ‘destructiveness’ in mediating between subjective and objective realities.
Moreover the intelligibility of this cryptic paper is considerably helped by
reading it in conjunction with its satellite material collated as Chapter 34
in Psychoanalytic Explorations (Winnicott 1989): these include the splitting
headache dream and a clinical commentary on an analysand known as the
‘Blake-man’ which we will consider later.

‘Primitive destructive impulses’
Winnicott asserts in his letter to Fordham that
Jung seems to have no contact with his own primitive destructive impulses, and he
gives support to this in his writing (Memories, Dreams, Reflections). When playing as
a small child Jung built and then destroyed, over and over again; he does not describe
himself playing constructively in relation to having (in unconscious fantasy) destroyed.
In my review I had related this to a difficulty Jung may have had being cared for by a
depressed mother (if this be true).
(Winnicott 1964)

In other words, in a Winnicottian vertex, the (maternal) environment in which
his spontaneous gestures with their admixture of ‘primitive destructive impulses’
could be risked and absorbed was not available. So Jung developed a ‘fatal
resistance to life in this world’ (Jung 1961, p. 24), which, in Winnicott’s
opinion, turned him away from object relations towards a restless, rather
manically impelled search for subjective containment instead. Consequently his
necessarily aggressive assertion remained unassimilated and concretely enacted.
Or so Winnicott interpreted Jung’s childhood game of constructing model
buildings only to parade his insistent omnipotence by triumphantly toppling
them with simulated earthquakes.
Certainly this would make poignant sense of Jung’s school phobia, his
childhood belligerence, its projection into the threatening Jesuit figure and the
images of violence and death that haunt these early chapters (Jung 1961). Indeed
his hiding his emblematic mannequin and stone in their secret and secure hiding
place—which echoed his childhood fascination with castles and fortifications—
may have been a touching effort to preserve the integrity of his No 1 personality
from just such threat. Later, when Jung’s relationship with Freud broke down
precipitating his profound crisis of 1913, this theme dramatically resurfaced
in images that anticipate Winnicott’s own dream of world-destruction. Jung

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dreamt, repeatedly, of a destructive flood (of uncontained affect?) submerging
Europe in a sea of blood1 only checked by the Swiss Alps which ‘grew higher
and higher to protect’ (1961, p. 175). Shortly after he wrote: ‘I felt as if gigantic
blocks of stone were tumbling down on me. . .. Others have been shattered by
them – Nietzsche. . .’ (1961, p. 177). So Jung too felt himself both destroyer and
destroyed: but Jung returned to his childhood stone building activities, found
some reparation and survived.
Such is the background to his more mature, sophisticated preoccupation with
mandalas and his life work of evolving a ‘containing’ metapsychological system.
Winnicott expresses his suspicion of such ‘self containing’ defensive formations
in no uncertain terms:
The mandala is a truly frightening thing for me because of its absolute failure to come
to terms with destructiveness, and with chaos, disintegration, and the other madnesses.
It is an obsessional flight from disintegration.
(Winnicott 1964)

In other words from his point of view it is the last bolthole of the false self, which
defensively excludes the madness that threatens but also nourishes (Phillips
1988).
But here I feel Winnicott (despite his analogous assumption of the role of
the yearned for maternal container) fails to appreciate that Jung’s turning to
such resorts, such substitute containments, was not merely evasive, but also
creatively resourceful (Feldman 1992). Nevertheless Winnicott was at least
consistent over this: he was also to take his second analyst, Joan Riviere, to
task for being overly invested in the ‘completeness’ of Kleinian theory (Rodman
2005, p. 272). And he certainly endeavoured to put his principles into clinical
practice, providing a containing environment sometimes beyond the usual
analytic boundaries, patiently waiting until his analysands could reach back
to their original ambivalent assertiveness and bring their needy assault to bear
on him. In pursuing this vision of cure he opened up new analytic ground, albeit
he acknowledged (rather grudgingly) the Kleinian contribution:
many others using varying techniques recurrently reached the ruthless primitive love
impulse in which the body—breast—mother—or whatever it is called—undergoes
ruthless attack and the result is something important taken out and eaten, that is to
say destroyed . . . we are sometimes able to reach this very thing. . .
(Winnicott 1999, Letter to Dr. Lantos, 1956)

In fact, Winnicott, by his own admission, was not able ‘to reach this very thing’
through either of his two analyses: so it remained a life-long preoccupation
until he achieved some resolution through his Jung-inspired dream. The quoted
passage helps our endeavour to understand ‘this very thing’ by combining the
1

Collectively engendered, prophetic anticipations of the Great War? Satinover (1985) makes a
persuasive case for this personal/relational reading.

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necessarily destructive (carnivorous) primitive hungry impulsion with the (love)
yearning for an object. That this albeit ruthless yearning should have an object
is of the essence: ‘in my opinion the aggressive impulse that is inherent is
extremely powerful and is part of the instinct which calls for relationships. It is
therefore an essential part of the primitive love impulse’ (Winnicott 1999, p. 40,
Letter to Money-Kyrle, 1952). Winnicott’s shorthand for this combination was
‘mouth love’: at first glance this might look like a sentimental version of what
Kleinians might call oral sadism, but this would not do Winnicott’s vision
justice. He is increasingly at pains to differentiate his particular position on
destructiveness from either Freudian presumptions of the operation of the death
instinct or Kleinian notions of primary envy. For Winnicott the first hurdle
in life was not so much an ego implying splitting and repression as a more
fundamental dissociation between the quiet (the erotically merging) and excited
(the aggressively differentiating) parts of infant experience. The baby is not
able to realize, except through risk and mother’s tolerance (her non-retaliatory
ongoing survival) that the cuddled and peaceful baby is the same as the one
who can be ‘screaming for immediate satisfaction, possessed by an urge to get
at and destroy something unless satisfied by milk’ (Winnicott 1960).
This evocation of the momentum of visceral assertion reaching for what it
needs out there in reality is the distinguishing hallmark of Winnicott’s vision.
‘The assumption is always there, in orthodox theory, that aggression is reactive
to the encounter with the reality principle, whereas here it is the destructive
drive that creates the quality of externality’ (Winnicott 1960). Instinctual
aggressiveness stirs appetite (and creative aspiration) whilst simultaneously
constellating a reality to meet it.2
From a bi-logic perspective this is the front line of asymmetrical impulsion,
the differentiation out of the maternal matrix.
The primary phase of (symmetric) unity
Winnicott’s appraisal of Jung’s mandala-like defence as a foreclosing on both
the disturbance and nourishment of ‘madness’ implies the risk that the ‘at
rest’ baby may become dissociated from the ‘instinctually urgent destructive’
baby. This is why he insistently emphasizes the unity (pre-splitting into
conflictual drives where the Kleinian model starts) of the primary phase where
‘the crux is that the first drive is itself one thing, something that I called
destruction, but it could have been called a combined love strife drive. Unity is
primary’ (Winnicott 1958). Without this primary experience of undifferentiated
(still symmetric) love/hate being able to unfold within containment, normal
maturational process is forestalled. This would include the evolution of a
2

Fortunately it was only after completing this paper that I discovered Jan Abram’s excellent The
Language of Winnicott (Karnac Books, 2007) else I would not have presumed to stumble towards
this territory that she has so authoritatively signposted, particularly in her entry on ‘aggression’.

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personal repressed unconscious (via Oedipus complex etc), towards which
Jung was notoriously impatient (see 5th Tavistock Lecture), prioritizing instead
‘individuation’ through engagement with the collective, archetypal stratum.
Winnicott, however, characterized Jung as being ‘left without a self with which
to know’ (1964), and worse, threatened with dissociation, depersonalization
and incipient disintegration into psychosis.
From a classical psychoanalytic perspective Winnicott’s shattering diagnosis
is probably correct enough. Yet his attitude toward Jung in the review is
always warm, the tone throughout animated and engaged: there is no hint
of the haughty, cool dismissiveness of which he was quite capable in other
contexts. Moreover, the more one reads of Winnicott on the agency of the self
(True Self in his terminology) the more like our Jungian understanding of the
incipient individuating psyche it sounds: the infant needs to ‘start by existing
not reacting’ else the false self will develop which always ‘lacks something, and
that something is the essential element of creative originality’ (Winnicott 1960).
And in his critique of Fairbairn he appeals ‘for a hypothesis that would allow
for areas of infancy experience and of ego development that are not basically
associated with instinctual conflict and where there is intrinsically a psychic
process such as that which we have here termed “primary (psychic) creativity”
(Winnicott 1989).
These notions, expressed in such language, are easily assimilable within a
Jungian perspective, particularly one informed by Michael Fordham’s postulates
of a primary self with its rhythm of reintegration and deintegration echoing
Winnicott’s ‘quiet’ and ‘excited’ baby. Nowhere is this sympathy (bearing in
mind that ‘psyche’ derives from ‘breath’) more evident than in this ancillary
comment on his ‘Object’ paper, resonant of the bi-logical schema adumbrated
earlier:
There is a phase prior to that which makes sense of the concept of fusion. . . . To get
quickly to the idea that I have in mind one could profitably use the idea of the fire from
the dragon’s mouth. I quote from Pliny who (in paying tribute to fire) writes, ‘Who
can say whether in essence fire is constructive or destructive?’ Indeed the physiological
basis for what I am referring to is the first and subsequent breaths, out-breathing.
In this vitally important early stage the ‘destructive’ (fire-air or other) aliveness of
the individual is simply a symptom of being alive. . . and has a vital positive function
(when, by survival of the object, it works), namely the objectivisation of the object
(the analyst in the transference). This task is bypassed [as we shall see, by Blake
certainly, but not entirely by Jung] in the schizoid personality or borderline case, and
presumably in schizophrenic illness.
(Winnicott 1989, p. 239)

This is the background to Winnicott’s great ‘The Use of an Object’ paper
in which he makes his most formal ‘statement of the positive value of
destructiveness’. The self is first registered through recognitions (initially the
mother’s response to the spontaneous gesture) but necessarily consolidated by
aggression. The subject has to feel able to influence potentially implacable,

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impenetrable ‘objective’ reality, and in the earliest primitive terms this amounts
to a phantasy of imposing itself on it by destroying it. And of course it is equally
important that reality survives the assault else the self is left marooned in a
wasteland. This is the fruition of Winnicott’s original brilliant insight—derived
from his exceptional depth of paediatric observation—that this dynamic tension
was also played out in his consulting room between infant and spatula. He
noted how characteristically the initial apprehension would lead onto tentative
mouthing, then to confident possession and finally to dismissal, a cycle revealing
the infant’s exploration of whether the spatula/breast/world could be assailed
without disastrous consequence before settling down to play with it.
Thus we find Winnicott talking about the necessity of a backdrop of
destruction, in fantasy, that keeps the object real, and so available for ‘use’: in
other words ‘me’ and ‘not-mine’ become securely differentiated. The object has
survived the assertive/destructive impulse whilst not retaliating or inhibiting,
and thereby established its integrity beyond the omnipotent control of the
subject. This mature state of object usage represents progression from the mere
subjective manipulation by or of one’s objects now termed ‘object relating’
(Winnicott 1969).
Blake and the creativity of destruction
My sense of a more palpable grasp on these matters came not from
reading Winnicott himself but from Ron Britton on William Blake (Britton
1998). Britton argues that Blake’s visionary belief could be understood in
psychoanalytic terms as a defensive organization he designates as epistemic
narcissism, a state of being compulsively invested in one’s own ideas only, a
counterpart in the realm of knowledge to the libidinal narcissist in the realm of
love. This would roughly equate to Winnicott’s charge that Jung ‘went down
under and found subjective life’ (Winnicott 1964). Thus:
Blake regarded his imagination as the divine source, the creator, and he regarded belief
as the act of creation; self doubt he saw as destruction:
If the sun and moon should doubt
They’d immediately go out.
He saw belief as truth formed by imagination and not received by perception; not
seeing is believing but believing is seeing. . . In psychoanalytic terms, it is a psychic
reality that claims to be true because it is internally valid and is independent of any
correspondence with external reality. We could paraphrase Blake’s description of the
eternal self as that of a true self that is only true to itself:
And in melodious accents, I
Will sit me down and cry, I, I.
From outside, this self would seem to oppose any version of reality other than its own;
from inside, any belief opposing that of the true self threatens to annihilate it.
(Britton 1998)

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It is surely no coincidence that Britton spontaneously adopts a Winnicottian
idiom with this emphatic reference to a true self and the threat of annihilation
(destruction pre-empted by destructiveness). For what looks like visionary
stubbornness derived of infantile megalomania from one perspective is surely
also in its origin and its core this same intangible essence that Winnicott is
so concerned to protect and conserve as being the source of the spontaneous
gesture and subsequent mature creativity (and Jungians might say the driver
of individuation). The problem of course is with bringing it into an effective
relationship with object relations and external reality, and this is where
Winnicott constantly recurs to the value of ‘fantasized destruction survived’.
So let us turn again to Blake whose visionary art could ‘body forth’ these
abstracted unconscious dynamics. He saw this struggle of the child whose
raw assertion had not been sufficiently mediated by a Winnicottian mother
in apocalyptic terms. Los (imagination equated with subjective will personified)
so exasperated by the impenetrable, material, objective world created by Urizen
(your reason) that he smashes it into fragments, thus producing a bottomless
abyss into which he then falls. The external world does not survive his attack
and the terrifying void thus created can then only be pre-empted by subjectively
meaningless compliance or else bounded by an even more insistent investment
in his own beliefs. The former option would in Winnicott’s terms be a resort to
the defence of the false self, but this brief overview of Blake’s visionary world is
as salutary a warning against the dangers of idealization of the true self, which
can lead to unrelated isolation (as it did for Blake), and even, in Bion’s (1959)
view, to attacks on the reality apprehending capacities of the psychic apparatus
itself.
With the benefit of hindsight some may feel that Winnicott’s translation of
this profound insight into clinical practice was, on occasion, not well judged.
Frameworks and boundaries were insufficiently valued as a neutral/mediating
aspect of reality, and the prioritizing of the true self’s presumed needs led
to confusing indulgence as the inhibited Los element in Winnicott sought
compensation through projective identification with—at least in the case of
Masud Khan—his analysand (Hopkins 2006).

Winnicott’s ‘Blake-man’
This patient’s appearance as a clinical illustration of ‘The Use of an Object’
paper was contemporaneous with Winnicott’s Jung pre-occupation, and I
believe, acted as a further bridge between them. This is how he is introduced:
I refer to a married man of 50, an erudite person held in high esteem in academic
circles. He is very sensitive and no doubt is not very satisfactory as a husband at a
physical level. . .along with his lack of aggression is a stubbornness which has provided
an alternative so that in fact he has a high position in his work.
(Winnicott 1969)

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Here, surely, we are reminded of Winnicott himself: difficulty with inhibitions
was his original reason for embarking on analysis, his first long marriage
remained unconsummated, and his stubbornness became legendary.
The name arose because one day he brought a quote from Blake—‘I fear
the fury of my wind’—which this ‘extremely unaggressive’ man associated with
both his own and Blake’s primitive anger. Winnicott describes him (like Jung)
as ‘fearing his strong mother and hating the weakness of his father’ and as
suffering from ‘inhibition (that) had to be of all spontaneity and impulse in
case some particle of the impulse might be destructive. The massive inhibition
necessarily involved his creative gesture’. The symptomatic consequence was
twofold, a stunted creativity and an unpredictable blasphemous compulsion ‘as
if he must think of whatever is sacred or holy or pure and spit over or soil it’
(Winnicott 1969, p. 235–8).
This is irresistibly reminiscent of the extraordinarily intense and sustained
passage where Jung describes the culmination of his childhood spiritual angst:
I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hellfire, and
let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky; God sits on his
golden throne, high above the world – and from under the throne an enormous turd
falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral
asunder. So that was it! I felt an enormous, and indescribable relief . . . I had yielded
to His inexorable command.
(Jung 1964)

Winnicott earlier in his review had asserted that Jung, because of his ‘vertical
split’ (implying by this dissociation rather the repression consequent on a
‘horizontal split’), had been unable to constellate a repressed ‘unconsciousaccording-to-Freud’. He now comments:
We could not expect to find Jung feeling God to be a projection of his own infantile
omnipotence and the shitting as a projection of his own hate of the father in the
mother.

And certainly Jung does appear to dissociate himself from his own exclusion and
helplessness by grandly attributing his consequent retaliatory destructiveness to
the will of God: thus neatly bypassing any Oedipal conflict and any reparative
object related remorse. More controversially Winnicott continues, ‘or at a more
primitive level, his own destruction of the good object because of its being
real in the sense of being outside the area of his omnipotence’ (Winnicott
1964). Here, I think, he goes too far, effectively placing Jung in the world of
Los and Urizen that we looked at earlier. Though there is something Blakean
about the terrible beauty of Jung’s vision he is not so absolutely invested in
the iconoclastic subjective imperative. Blake invented his own mythology; Jung
went to exceptional lengths to research and find a collective basis for his.
Nevertheless we are certainly in that strange symbiotic territory where
Winnicott dreamt ‘for Jung, for my patients, and for myself’. Might we further

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wonder just how much projection of his own pathology—spiced perhaps
by an admixture of Winnicott’s diffident masculinity envying Jung’s phallic
assertiveness—there was in his diagnosis of Jung?
Winnicott’s shadow
There is a typically Winnicottian paradoxical tension between his constant call
to respect the essential ‘privacy of the self’, so vulnerable to intrusion and
impingement, and what Bollas (1987) has called his delight in ‘the role of
the impishly critical other’. Nevertheless we might make bold and speculate
on the distant echo of his ‘Blake-man’s’ blasphemous compulsion and Jung’s
cathedral/turd dream in his first analyst’s (Strachey) report that Winnicott
believed he might have urinated on his mother just after birth and that he
subsequently loved to piss in the sea (Rodman 2005, p. 72). The nearest the
young Winnicott got to any public expression of an uninhibited impulse was
his celebrated 12-year-old ‘Drat!’ that precipitated his corrective consignment
to boarding school (Rodman 2005, p. 20).
Rodman, in his splendid biography, introduces this late period of Winnicott’s
life, initiated by the review and the dream, as one when he ‘proceeded into
Jungian territory, and . . . wrote his poem ‘The Tree’ (in which he identifies
with Christ’s sacrifice) the most profound autobiographical statement of his
life’ (Rodman 2003). This passage conveys the essence of his conviction that
servitude to his mother’s depression had defined his life trajectory:
Once, stretched out on her lap
as now on dead tree
I learned to make her smile
to stem her tears
to undo her guilt
to cure her inward death
To enliven her was my living
So she became wife, mother, home
The carpenter enjoyed his craft
Children came and loved and were loved . . . . .

Here Winnicott symmetrically identifies both with Christ and his mother,
casting himself as the wounded healer—‘Children came and loved and were
loved. . .’ But as Andr´e Green (1986) has shown, the legacy of an affectively
‘dead mother’ can be extraordinarily persistent: Winnicott’s own embodying
of a resilient maternal presence was an inestimable boon for his patients, not
enough for himself. The poem was written in 1963, the same year as his most
explicit acknowledgement of Jungian influence in his ‘Communicating’ paper,
his immersion in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and his splitting headache
dream—of which I now offer a fairly full transcription in italics with my
commentary interpolated.

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The ‘splitting headache’ dream of destruction
This was one in the long line of significant dreams that. . . appear as a result
of work done. . . (presumably the review on Jung) it cleared up the mystery of
an element of my psychology that analysis could not reach, namely, the feeling
that I would be all right if someone would split my head open (front to back)
and take out something (tumour, abscess, sinus, suppuration) that exists and
makes itself felt right in the centre behind the root of the nose.
This metaphor of requiring surgery to correct something he can ‘smell’ is
profoundly wrong has the deepest of roots for Winnicott. In a letter to his
sister Violet as early as 1919 he wrote: ‘the brain is the mass of grey and
white matter which lies hidden in the skull. . . psychoanalysis cuts right to the
root of the matter. . . an instinct repressed along abnormal paths is liable to be
shored down deep into the unconscious and act as a foreign body; this ‘foreign
body’ may remain in the subconscious for a whole lifetime. . .’ (Winnicott
1999).
Within the dream Winnicott’s wish for metaphorical surgery is realized as he
‘could see my head split right through, with a black gap between the right and
left halves. I found the words ‘splitting headache’ coming and waking me up,
and I caught on to the appropriateness of the description’. Morey (2005, p. 345)
made the brilliantly apt connection of this to Emblem 23 of Michael Maier’s
Atalanta Fugiens alchemical illustrations depicting a furnace worker splitting
open the skull of a reclining, contemplative Zeus-like figure. Imagos arising
spontaneously from the collective unconscious? Or could Winnicott have had
access to such material through his friendship with Michael Fordham?
Either way the dream problem addressed here, which the young Winnicott
had intuitively anticipated as an ‘instinct repressed’, we might now characterize
as the malignant rumbling of primitive destructive impulses as yet unassimilated.
The dream can be given in its three parts:
1. There was absolute destruction, and I was part of the world and of all
people, and therefore I was being destroyed. Is this the cosmic escalation
of infantile (omnipotent) expectation utterly dashed? (The important thing
in the early stages was the way in which in the dream the pure destruction
got free from all the other modifications, such as object relating, cruelty,
sensuality, sadomasochism, etc). This bracketed elaboration is particularly
worth noting; in Matte Blancian terms it describes the dreaming Winnicott
accessing a more symmetrical level of experience, thereby engaging the
collective and beyond that the unrepressed that underlies the personal
repressed unconscious.
2. Then there was absolute destruction and I was the destructive agent. This
would be the counterpart, the ultimate extension of the tantrum’s rage.
Here then was a problem for the ego, how to integrate these two aspects
of destruction? Note the perfectly symmetric form of Winnicott’s vision, in

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William Meredith-Owen

which he is alternately both subject and object: just as earlier we saw Jung
cast as both the tower-toppler and the avalanche victim.
3. Part three now appeared and in the dream I awakened. As I awakened
I knew I had dreamed both (one) and (two). I had therefore solved the
problem, by using the difference between waking and sleeping states. This
is his dream analogue of finding access to maternal reverie or bringing
alpha function to bear on otherwise unmetabolizable beta elements. Here
was I awake, in the dream, and I knew I had dreamed of being destroyed
and of being the destroying agent. There was no dissociation. . . this felt
to be immensely satisfactory. . . crucially, from a bi-logical perspective, we
can now understand this as a description of ‘affect’ (experienced here with
archetypal intensity) being able to come into personal/ego-based ‘mind’. As
asymmetric thought is introduced, not in divorce from the dissociated affect
but out of it, love and hate, subject and object can begin to separate.
Without this third I must remain split, solving the problem alternately in sadism
and masochism, using object relating, that is, relating to objectively perceived
objects.
This last phrase, quietly slipped in—‘relating to objectively perceived
objects’—is pure Winnicott. At first glance teasingly paradoxical: surely relating
to ‘objectively perceived objects’ would be a positive thing, a perception
unsaturated with projections? But Winnicott implies that such a basis can
only offer an engagement with reality, with others, that is reduced essentially
to compliance or control (‘. . .alternately in sadism and masochism’). It is the
affectively driven pursuit of the realization of a subjective need through the
other that shapes the transitional object, and leads on to mature ‘object usage’.
This is the capacity that Winnicott felt was so vulnerable to impairment by the
inhibition of ‘primitive destructive impulses’ so vividly illustrated by his own
bind to his mother depicted in ‘The Tree’.
I now began to wake up.
He concludes—first there is the creativity that belongs to being alive, and the
world is only a subjective world. This is the world of Blake. Then there is the
objectively perceived world and absolute destruction of it and all its details. This
is the world that Blake (Los) felt compelled to destroy or deny; but Winnicott
(unlike Blake, who remained absolutely defiant) now realizes that ‘object usage’,
rather than the inhibited, compromised ‘object relating’, may be discovered
to lie at the other side of this destruction. He concludes—The wasteland (of
destroyed reality) turns out to have features in its own right, or survival value,
etc, and surprisingly the individual child finds total destruction does not mean
total destruction (Winnicott 1989 p. 228–9).
Object usage may now begin, but not apparently for Jung: for, as we saw,
Winnicott construes Jung’s building towers/simulating earthquakes ‘activity’
(Winnicott would hesitate to call it a ‘game’) as evidence of his failure to

Winnicott on Jung

69

integrate his primitive destructive impulses. They had not been ‘brought into
mind’, imaginatively assimilated, as they needed to be, in order to create
transitional objects: objects whose implacable otherness could be destroyed
yet could also be allowed to remain actual, separate and there.
Winnicott’s ambivalence about Jung
Such a reading certainly fits Winnicott’s agenda, and, as we noted earlier, is
consistent with Jung’s bleak childhood memories. Perhaps, symbolically, it
accounts for Jung’s later attack on the edifice of Freud’s work, which, of course,
he had had a significant hand in constructing. And certainly the ruthless Old
Testament Yahweh, the omnipotent creator and destroyer that he addressed in
Answer to Job, fascinated Jung.
But Winnicott himself, if not iconoclastic, was certainly determinedly
idiosyncratic. Let us recall that Sedgwick suggests ‘Winnicott’s unconscious
created this particular Jung to get the healing he needed’ (Sedgwick 2008).
My argument is that ‘this particular Jung’ served as a vehicle through which
Winnicott could address his own constrained destructiveness because it was writ
so large in Jung, while remaining so inhibited in himself. Through ‘his’ Jung he
could vent ‘the fury of his wind’ by proxy and thus reach back to that stratum
of the unrepressed unconscious where assertive and destructive impulses were
not yet differentiated.
This was a resource that was missing from his classical psychoanalytic
vocabulary. He was reaching (ambivalently) towards it through his relationship
with Fordham and his immersion in Jung’s childhood autobiography; and he
made a palpable curative contact with it in his splitting headache dream. The
closest he got to conscious awareness, certainly to public recognition of this, was
in his ‘Communicating’ paper when he wrote that in the context of patients with
infantile disturbance diagnosed as psychotic or schizophrenic (as he was later to
describe Jung in his review), ‘I find I am able to join up with a whole lot of Dr.
Fordham’s observations, which, however, I think he did not properly link with
the classification of the patients because he had not time’ (Winnicott 1963a).
This, presumably, is Winnicott with rather disingenuous politeness, suggesting that Fordham had underestimated his patients’ pathology. Ironically
it was Fordham, not Winnicott, who first diagnosed the autobiographical
Jung as a childhood schizophrenic: Jung apparently did not demur (Fordham
1975). However the contemporary consensus amongst experienced Jungian
child analysts is that Jung displayed psychotic structure, not schizophrenia.
Nevertheless Winnicott has unflinchingly drawn our attention to the shadow
that haunts the Jungian tendency to immersion in the subjective world
and the extent to which that may be a defence against psychotic fears of
abandonment/object-loss fore-closing on normal maturational processes (the
development of a repressed ‘unconscious-according-to-Freud’ leading onto
Oedipal conflict and resolution) (Satinover 1985).

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We might cavil that although Winnicott’s Jung was very much a ‘subjective
object’, his diagnosis is nevertheless delivered in a quasi objective, albeit
somewhat cavalier, psychiatric style. But it is evidenced and is absolutely
consistent with the more formal and measured description of early childhood
pathology he presented in a contemporaneous paper, ‘The mentally ill in your
caseload’ (Winnicott 1963b). This is an enlightening accompaniment to any
re-reading of the review: indeed in Winnicott’s hands Memories, Dreams,
Reflections becomes a classic clinical case history illustration of pre-Oedipal
disturbance.
No, for me the issue is not so much the diagnosis as the long shadow it cast,
his insistence that Jung’s attempt at self-cure—his creative vision of the Self—
was essentially defensive pretension. ‘The centre of the self’ was evidently not
a useless concept to Jung, or to generations of those beforehand in a variety
of mystical traditions who expressed themselves in similar terms. It may well
be that the relinquishment of investment in the ego, often adumbrated within
such disciplines as a necessary precursor to being enfolded in God’s arms, is in
part a sublimation of the pain of the infant’s abandonment. Winnicott presents
the aspiration to such a union as only a defensive closure, the attainment of
such enlightenment a spurious evasion of reaching down to the ‘basic forces of
individual living’ (Winnicott 1964).
If we define destructiveness in neo-Kleinian idiom as the disposition to
denigrate the generosity of the ‘good breast’ and to attack the ‘creativity of the
parental couple’, then those early chapters of Memories, Dreams, Reflections
reveal what compelling reason Jung had for being at the very best deeply
conflicted in these (literal) respects. It is no great stretch to see his lifelong
quest for the centre of the self—surrounded/symbolized by the mandala—as
in part a sublimation of his unrequited longing for the breast; and in his deep
appreciation of arcane traditions his implicit homage to the wished for creativity
of the parental intercourse. In the absence of an original satisfying object, Jung
made a wonderfully rich use of such cultural transitional objects instead.
Moreover, whatever the shortcomings deriving from his unintegrated ambivalence towards his objects—the hint of paranoid volatility in his reaction to Freud
over the Kreuzlingen incident, his handling of Sabina Spielrein, his occasional
irascibility and, possibly, his disconsolate air of dissatisfaction towards the
end (Fordham 1993)—throughout his life he kept the door open wide to
the unrepressed unconscious, and was rewarded by his exceptional ongoing
creativity. Winnicott’s charge that Jung’s preoccupation with mandalas was
a defensive closure against the threat of madness seems misconceived: the
recently published Red Book is hardly the work of a man lacking courage
in that respect. I think that what Winnicott misses—curiously for a man
with his natural love of paradox—is Jung’s innate gift, shared with many
artists, for engaging with what Matte Blanco calls symmetric logic. Evidences
of this manifested in paranormal phenomena, synchronicity, alchemy, and
multifarious esoteric disciplines across the spectrum from the physical to the

Winnicott on Jung

71

spiritual, fascinated Jung. Though Winnicott acknowledges the brilliance of
Jung’s insights in these fields—which culminate in his conceptualization of the
collective unconscious—he nevertheless insists they make little contribution to
the practice of psychoanalysis.
So why is Winnicott so ambivalent about recognizing the achievement
of his ‘twin’? Most obviously there is the historical tension between the
Freudian and Jungian traditions which, to be fair, Winnicott addresses and
illuminates explicitly in his review. But although he does indeed recommend
cross fertilization he is much more articulate about Jung’s liabilities than he is
about his assets. As Rodman puts it, ‘The plea that he makes for psychoanalysts
to come to terms with Jung, however, is never supported by evidence of the value
of Jung’s contributions to analysis. . .’ (Rodman 2003, p. 287). Jung, as well
as being a source of (unconscious) inspiration to Winnicott, also embodied his
shadow (from a Jungian perspective there would be no contradiction in this): so
it is no surprise to find him both fascinated by and dismissive towards him. His
contemptuous swipe at Jungian concepts, ‘I cannot be communicated with in
this language’, in the midst of an otherwise constructive dialogue with Michael
Fordham in his ‘Counter-transference’ paper is typical of this ambivalence. And
there was surely political pressure as well: although he had twice served as
president of the British Psychoanalytic Society he had long been marginalized
by the dominant Kleinian group, whilst being treated with some wariness by the
classically-orientated for his innovative technique. Too overt a rapprochement
with Jung would have risked even further isolation.
There may also have been some envy in the mix. Although he writes
‘nevertheless the idea of the self is very well dealt with by Jungians, and it is for
psychoanalysts to learn what they can in this field’ (Winnicott 1963a), in fact
he is not overly helpful in facilitating this. It is more a polite acknowledgement
of a neighbour who may indeed have every, possibly even prior, right to be
there (in this territory of the ‘self’) but Winnicott is not looking for that close a
relationship, as if anticipating a potential tension over territorial rights.
But the most satisfying explanation, certainly in the context of this paper, is
that this ambivalence is Winnicott’s sophisticated, grown-up enactment of his
bringing these very ‘primitive destructive impulses’ to bear on that which feels
closest. What is more distant does not threaten to pre-empt or impinge; does
not merit destruction in order that it might be (re)found for oneself. In which
spirit it is of course vital that Jung (and Jungians) survive: if not unmodified,
certainly undestroyed.
Conclusion
This paper suggests that Matte Blanco’s bi-logic offers us a framework for
understanding Winnicott’s engagement with Jung: an engagement driven by
his intuitive recognition of their shared dissociated predicament occasioned
by the frustration of their elemental assertiveness (love/hate) which remained

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uncontained in early object relations. The consequent cost to Winnicott’s
potency remained unalleviated by extensive analysis of his ‘unconsciousaccording-to-Freud’, nor, Winnicott avers, would that have resolved Jung’s
difficulties with his ‘primitive destructive impulses’. Both men endeavoured to
reach beyond the repressed unconscious ‘to get at the healing (they) needed’
in some primary emergence (construed as affect by Winnicott, psyche by Jung)
of the unrepressed unconscious. Winnicott found it, appropriately enough, in
his archetypal, symmetrically structured dream of destruction being able to
come into mind (feel contained). He felt Jung needed this too—but his was the
earthquake-inducing Jung, not the patient stone-carver, the veteran survivor of
just such ‘conjunctio oppisotorums’.
Yes, as Winnicott, and later Satinover (1985), argued persuasively, there was
avoidance of object loss (and its destructive consequences for self and other)
in Jung’s claim that ‘the objective psyche forms the counterposition to the
subjective ego. It can therefore be designated as a Thou’ (1951, para. 1505,
‘Reply to Buber’). But Jung’s omnipotence, in contrast to Blake’s insistent
investment in the subjective imperative, was at least partially contained by his
lifework of assimilating and articulating personal, clinical and cultural evidences
of the objective psyche coming into mind—the unfolding into the collective
unconscious of the inexpressible unrepressed.
I have sought to correlate this with Winnicott’s enduring quest to reach back
to the emergence of affect—the fire of the dragon’s breath. On which we might
allow Blake the last word:
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
(Blake 1988)

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT
Cet article analyse la critique de Jung par Winnicott, principalement contenue dans
son compte-rendu de l’ouvrage de Jung, Ma vie, souvenirs, rˆeves, pens´ees. Winnicott y
affirme que l’apport cr´eatif de Jung a` l’analyse fut entrav´e par son e´ chec a` int´egrer ses
« pulsions destructrices primaires » r´esultant d’une inad´equation du contenant pr´ecoce.
Bien que le diagnostic de Winnicott mette en lumi`ere l’ombre de Jung, essentiellement
ses r´eticences vis-a-vis
de l’inconscient freudien, William Meredith-Owen soutient qu’il
`
ne parvient pas a` e´ valuer la port´ee du contenant compensatoire d´ecouvert par Jung dans
l’inconscient collectif. Ce lien e´ nigmatique entre destruction et cr´eativit´e—si essentiel
chez le dernier Winnicott—est e´ clair´e par la bi-logique de Matte Bianco et, au-dela,
`
explor´e en lien avec l’œuvre de William Blake. L’´equation personnelle de Winnicott, a`
travers son rˆeve de destruction inspir´e par Jung, rˆeve a` l’origine d’un « violent mal de
tˆete » et pr´ec´edemment analys´e dans ces pages par Morey (2005) et Sedgwick (2008),
est ici e´ tudi´ee avec une attention particuli`ere.

Winnicott on Jung

73

Dieser Beitrag behandelt Winnicotts Kritik an Jung wie sie hauptsachlich
in seiner Bewer¨
tung von ‘Erinnerungen, Traume,
Gedanken’ zum Ausdruck kommt und in der behauptet
¨
wird, daß Jungs kreativer Beitrag zur Analyse durch sein aus einem unzureichenden
fruhen
Gehaltensein resultierenden Unvermogen
behindert wurde, seine ‘primitiven
¨
¨
destruktiven Impulse’ zu integrieren. Es wird argumentiert, daß, obgleich Winnicotts Diagnose Jungs Schatten beleuchtet (hierbei besonders dessen Einschrankungen
gegenuber
¨
¨
dem unterdruckten
Freudschen Unbewußten), es verpaßt wird, die Wirksamkeit
¨
des kompensatorischen Gehaltenwerdens zu wurdigen,
welches Jung im Kollektiven
¨
Unbewußten gefunden hat. Die enigmatische Beziehung zwischen Destruktion und
Kreativitat—so
zentral fur
Winnicott—wird anhand von Matte Biancos Bi¨
¨ den spaten
¨
Logik beleuchtet und weitergehend in Beziehung zu William Blake gesetzt. Winnicotts
personlicher
Losung
durch seinen von Jung inspirierten ‘spaltenden-Kopfschmerz¨
¨
Traum’ von Zerstorung—in
der Vergangenheit in diesem Journal abgehandelt von
¨
Morey (2005) und Sedgwick (2008)—wird besondere Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet.

Questo scritto prende in considerazione la critica di Winnicott a Jung, principalmente
espressa nella sua revisione di Sogni, ricordi, riflessioni dove si afferma che il contributo
creativo di Jung all’analisi fu limitato dal suo fallimento nell’integrazione dei suoi
“primitivi impulsi distruttivi” susseguenti a un inadeguato contenimento precoce.
Si sostiene che sebbene la diagnosi di Winnicott mette a fuoco l’ombra di Jung,
manca tuttavia di apprezzare l’efficacia del contenimento compensatorio che Jung
trovo` nell’inconscio collettivo. L’enigmatica relazione tra creativita` e distruttivita—
`
cos`ı centrale all’ultimo Winnicott—viene chiarita dalla bi-logica di Matte Blanco, e
ulteriormente esplorata in relazione a William Blake. Viene data particolare attenzione
alla soluzione personale di Winnicott attraverso il sogno della distruzione, ispirato al
terribile mal di testa di Jung – precedentemente considerato in questo Journal da Mlorey
(2005) e Sedgwick (2008).

ta stat rassmatrivaet kritiku nga Vinnikotom, iznaqalno
vyskazannu v ego obzore «Vospominani, snovideni, razmyxleni»;
Vinnikot sqitaet tvorqeski vklad nga neskolko natnutym,
poskolku ng neudaqno integriroval svoi «primitivnye destruktivnye
impulsy» vsledstvie neadekvatnogo rannego kontenirovani. V
state utverdaec, qto hot diagnoz Vinnikota vysveqivaet ten
nga, i, osobenno, ego naprennost po otnoxeni k vytesnennomu
fredisckomu bessoznatelnomu, vse e tako podhod ne sposoben vozdat
dolnoe destvennosti kompensatornogo kontenirovani, nadennogo
ngom v kollektivnom bessoznatelnom. Zagadoqnye otnoxeni medu
destruktivnost i tvorqestvom—stol vana, centralna tema dl
pozdnego Vinnikota—osvewats s pomow bi-logiki Mate Blanko i
issleduts dalee po otnoxeni k Uilmu Bleku. Osoboe znaqenie
pridaec liqnomu razrexeni togo konflikta Vinnikotom na primere
ego (vdohnovlennogo ngom) sna o «raskalyvawe golovno boli» i
destrukcii, sna, ranee razbiravxegos v tom urnale Moreem (2005) i
Sedvikom (2008).

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William Meredith-Owen

Este trabajo considera la cr´ıtica de Winnicott a Jung, principalmente aquella expresada
en su revision
´ de ‘Recuerdos, Suenos
˜ y Pensamientos’, donde afirma que la contribucion
´
creadora de Jung al analisis
estuvo limitada por su fracaso para integrar los ‘impulsos
´
primitivos destructivos’, como consecuencia de una inadecuada contencion
´ temprana.
Se argumenta que aunque el diagnostico
de Winnicott ilumine la Sombra de Jung,
´
especialmente sus limitaciones vis-a-vis con respecto al inconsciente freudiano reprimido,
fracasa en apreciar la eficacia de la contencion
´ compensatoria encontrada por Jung en
el inconsciente colectivo. Esta relacion
entre destruccion
´ enigmatica
´
´ y creatividad—tan
central en el Winnicott tard´ıo—es ilustrada por la bi-logica
de Matte Blanco, y mas
´
´
explorado aun
´ en relacion
´ a William Blake. Se presta especial atencion
´ a resolucion
´
personal de Winnicott a trav´es de su sueno
˜ de destruccion
´ ‘del lacerante dolor de
cabeza’ inspirado por Jung–anteriormente estudiado en este Journal por Morey (2005)
y Sedgwick (2008)

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[Ms first received August 2009; final version September 2010]