Abstract

The British pediatrician, psychoanalyst, and theorist, D. W. Winnicott, , repeatedly returned to philosophical themes in articles dealing with clinical issues. In response to the problems that Winnicott confronted as a clinician, he was led to a concern with ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic issues, insofar as they were implicated in the earliest phases of human development. I intend to demonstrate that the issue of human embodiment emerges as one of the central themes addressed in Winnicott's discourse. I will argue that Winnicott provides a sustained and probing meditation, which runs like a thread throughout his work, on the nature and significance of the body in human existence. While a pediatrician and psychoanalyst could hardly ignore the body, Winnicott pushed the psychoanalytic conversation concerning embodiment in new directions as he elaborated on the earliest processes of self formation. ;Not only does embodiment emerge as a central theme in Winnicott's discourse, but his discourse also represents an important and original contribution to our understanding of this theme. Winnicott's examination of the way in which the body is involved in the establishment of the sense of self, in the early experience of concern for another, and in the first appearance of imaginative play represents an important contribution to understanding the significance of embodiment. There are four interrelated reasons for undertaking this study: To further explicate the work of a theorist increasingly recognized as one of the most important psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud. To examine Winnicott's extensive account of how the body is implicated in the coming into being of the self. To delineate a contribution to psychoanalytic thinking about the body that draws attention to the role of both the drives and object relations in the formation of the embodied self. To locate Winnicott' s contribution concerning embodiment in relation to the extensive twentieth century philosophical discourse on this theme; I will show that his account of holding and the psyche-soma partnership represents an important archeology of the embodiment of self