Winnicott and the Proper Use of the Object

Written in 1941, Winnicott’s clinical observations on the child-object relationship reveal that the child goes from a pulsion of destruction of the fantasized object to the taking over of the real object, which is the access condition to his subject’s autonomy, as Freud had already emphasized about Fort-Da. In his last text, in 1968, Winnicott extends his research by bringing closer the child’s and the analyst’s situation in the object relationship : the analyst must accept to be “used” in order to let his patient access his own subjectivity and take over its history.