The illusion of contact: Insights from Winnicott’s 1952 letter to Klein

Using Winnicott’s theory, this article produces an account of the individual’s relation to a given conceptual framework. Whereas Winnicott’s ideas have been almost exclusively discussed in developmental and psychopathological contexts, the present article extends Winnicott’s theory and applies it to the problem of interpersonal understanding. Taking a lead from one of Winnicott’s letters to Klein, the article investigates the problem of expressing one’s idiosyncratic insights in the confines of a given conceptual framework. The article examines Winnicott’s theory of compliance and creativity, discusses the plea that Winnicott makes to Klein, analyses the encounter with a “dead language”, an…

The Structure of Group Identification

The concept of group identification has been widely discussed in the fields of social psychology and social ontology. The debate has been somewhat unbalanced, however. The structure, nature, and experiential status of groups have been assessed widely and from several perspectives. Instead, the concept of identification as received considerably less attention. This is why the ongoing debate threatens to be misled by various conceptual ambiguities. These ambiguities concern first and foremost the target, structure, and temporal nature of identification. The present article offers a philosophical analysis of the concept and clarifies the conceptual ambiguities haunting the debate. peerReviewed

Winnicott and the (un)integrated self

The capacity to relax and letting one's mind wander is one of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis. In cases where this capacity seems hindered, the reasons are characteristically sought from particular and specific inhibitions: what is thereby taken to be interfered is not the capacity of relaxation but only the activation of this capacity in a particular regard. In contrast to this mainstream way of thinking, Winnicott argues that the capacity for mental relaxation is a developmental achievement and presupposes a safe sense of integration. The present article investigates this dynamism. It clarifies how an integral sense of self arises out of primary unintegration, explains how a well-estab…

The Modifying Mirror

Abstract This chapter compares music listening with the infant’s experience of care. Several scholars have argued that music can be used for scaffolding one’s self-experience. Developmental psychologists, in turn, maintain a wide consensus over the claim that, in early interaction, the attuned caregiver supports and modifies the infant’s self-experience in various ways. The chapter brings these phenomena together, illustrating how the examination of the early self/other relation can teach us something important concerning the listener/music relation. The first section elaborates on the scaffolding function of music and clarifies two ambiguities haunting the debate. The second section reloca…

Sharing and Other Illusions : Asymmetry in "Moments of Meeting"

This chapter tackles the question of interpersonal understanding from the point of view of so-called “moments of meeting.” Coined by Daniel Stern and his colleagues, this term refers to specific and particularly intense experiential situations, where two (or more) persons attune to each other’s affective experiences, thus “cocreating” an experiential area that exists to these two individuals exclusively—a “shared private world,” as Stern puts it (Stern, 2004). While moments of meeting have attracted a lot of interest in research on psychotherapeutic change, clinical effectivity, and outcome, the usefulness of the concept in nonclinical discussions has been overlooked. The chapter fills in t…

Sosiaalinen havainto : affektiivisuus, empatia ja tunnustaminen

Donald Winnicott luovuudesta

Psykoanalyytikko Donald Winnicott ajattelee luovuutta koko elämää läpäisevänä olemisen tapana. Lastenlääkärinäkin työskennelleen Winnicottin mukaan luovuuden perusta on vauvan kyvyssä luoda oma maailmansa. Aikuisen ihmisen luovuus on tämän kyvyn säilyttämistä, kehittämistä ja kultivoimista läpi elämän. peerReviewed

Building bridges within and across Husserlian phenomenology

A book review of Dan Zahavi. Husserl’s Legacy. Phenomenology, Metaphysics & Transcendental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2017, 236 pp. nonPeerReviewed

Anonymity of the ‘Anyone’ : The Associative Depths of Open Intersubjectivity

Husserl’s concept of “open intersubjectivity” expresses the peculiarity that the environment appears as being there for “anyone”. The structurally implicated, potential co-perceivers have been rendered anonymous, unspecified, which is another way of saying that the horizontally implicated “anyone” refers to no one in particular, but to “any alter egos whatever”. My article focuses on this tacit structural referencing to potential others and challenges the claim of anonymity. In the literature, it has been argued that the potential others are implicitly specified as co-members of our community, or “homecomrades”. I will push the idea of specification further, and into a new direction, by arg…

Toisten kokeminen ja mielentilojen melodisuus

Toiset ihmiset hahmottuvat meille ensi sijassa ajallisina kokonaisuuksina. Kokemuksemme toisista muistuttaa tässä musiikkikokemusta. Melodioiden ja rytmien hetkelliset osat eivät nouse esiin sellaisinaan vaan hahmottuvat suhteessa niiden ajalliseen jatkumoon. Toisten ihmisten kokemisen analysoiminen yksittäisten mielentilojen näkökulmasta onkin kuin melodiaa tai rytmiä kuunneltaisiin vain yksittäisten äänten tai iskujen kannalta. peerReviewed

Normality

The chapter explicates the central resources that classical Husserlian phenomenology and its contemporary elaborations offer for the study of psychic disorders. We shall first discuss the phenomenological principles that enable analysis of the conditions and limits of experiencing and sense-constitution. We shall then clarify the concepts that phenomenologists have developed for the discussion of the normality and abnormality of experiencing—optimality and concordance—while also paying heed to the types of phenomena that classical and contemporary phenomenologists have tackled while developing their methods. In this vein, we will emphasize methodological factors that separate phenomenologic…

Controlling the uncontrollable. Self-regulation and the dynamics of addiction

The multidisciplinary research on addictions generally promotes the assumption that addictive behavior is caused and maintained by the external psychoactive substance, which accordingly is consider...

Leikin viemää : Fink, Winnicott ja leikin kokemuksellinen paikka

Minne leikki vie meidät? Fenomenologi Eugen Finkin (1905–1975) teoria leikistä nojaa käsitteelliseen erotteluun subjektiivisen kuvittelun ja ulkoisen havainnon välillä, ja hän jäsentää leikin maailman näiden alueiden yhdistelmänä. Psykoanalyytikko Donald Winnicott (1896–1971) puolestaan hahmottelee leikin kokemuksellisena alueena, joka edeltää tällaisen erottelun jäsentymistä. Teorioiden keskinäinen suhde on mielenkiintoinen: Finkin näkökulmasta Winnicott ohittaa keskeisen fenomenologisen erottelun, kun taas Winnicottin kannalta Finkin teoria on adultomorfinen eli nojaa kategorioihin, jotka vakiintuvat lapsen kehityksessä vasta myöhemmin. Artikkeli tutkii näitä kahta teoriaa, arvioi niiden …

Filosofiasta psykoanalyysiin

Kirja-arvio teoksesta Jussi Kotkavirta, Tuhkaa ja timanttia I. Kirjoituksia filosofiasta ja psykoanalyysista. Ntamo, Helsinki 2015. 244 s. nonPeerReviewed

The Unseen, the Discouraged, and the Outcast : Expressivity and the Foundations of Social Recognition

AbstractThis article analyzes different pathologies of social affirmation and examines the grounds of social recognition from the point of view of the concept of expression. The red thread of the text is provided by Tove Jansson’s fictional works, and the focus will be on three cases in particular (the magic hat, the invisible girl and the figure of the Groke). The article sets out from the phenomenological distinction between the sensible expression, on the one hand, and the expressed content, on the other. By focusing on the three cases, the article distinguishes and analyses the fundamental structures of communal life and explicates different ways in which social affirmation can be one-s…

Self-regulation and Beyond: Affect Regulation and the Infant–Caregiver Dyad

In the available psychological literature, affect regulation is fundamentally considered in terms of self-regulation, and according to this standard picture, the contribution of other people in our affect regulation has been viewed in terms of socially assisted selfregulation. The present article challenges this standard picture. By focusing on affect regulation as it unfolds in early infancy, it will be argued that instead of being something original and fundamental, self-regulation developmentally emerges from the basis of a further type of affect regulation. While infants’ capacities in recognizing, understanding, and modifying their own affective states are initially immature and undeve…

Being Carried Away : Fink and Winnicott on the Locus of Playing

Abstract The article investigates the question of the experiential location of the area of play, comparing the accounts of Eugen Fink and Donald Winnicott. It argues that while Fink builds on the phenomenological distinction between subjective phantasy and external perception, and accordingly introduces the area of play as a hybrid realm, a peculiar combination of the two, Winnicott considers the area of play as something that underlies and developmentally precedes the experiential differentiation between phantasy and external reality. While from Fink’s viewpoint Winnicott’s model neglects a central phenomenological distinction, from Winnicott’s viewpoint Fink’s account, in turn, appears ad…

Introduction: Phenomenological approaches to Tove Jansson’s fiction

Social mirrors. Tove Jansson’sInvisibleChildand the importance of being seen

ABSTRACTThis article examines the experience of being seen and analyzes its central role in the formation of a coherent sense of self. Tove Jansson’s short story from 1962, ‘The Invisible Child’, serves as the red thread of the article, and the story is analyzed in the light of Donald Winnicott’s work on social mirroring. The analysis is enriched by the psychoanalytic insights of Veikko Tahka and Heinz Kohut, and complemented by Axel Honneth’s philosophical elaborations as well as by recent developmental findings as presented by Vasudevi Reddy. The article is divided into an introduction and three sections. After summarizing Jansson’s story in the introduction, the first section elaborates …

Group-Directed Empathy: A Phenomenological Account

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the fields of social cognition and social ontology. Drawing on both classical and more recent phenomenological studies, the article develops an account ofgroup-directed empathy. The first part of the article spells out the phenomenological notion of empathy and suggests certain conceptual distinctions vis-à-vis two different kinds of group. The second part of the paper applies these conceptual considerations to cases in which empathy is directed at groups and elucidates the sense in which individuals can empathically target not only other individual’s emotions, but also shared emotions as such. Clarifying the structure of group-directed emp…

Vakiintunut väliaikaisratkaisu : addiktio, itsesäätely ja toistaminen

The Pain of Granting Otherness : Interoception and the Differentiation of the Other / Der Schmerz der Gewährung von Andersheit : Interozeption und die Differenzierung des Objekts

SummaryThis article examines the foundations of social experience from a psychoanalytic perspective. In current developmental psychology, social cognition debate, and phenomenology of empathy, it is widely assumed that the self and the other are differentiated from the outset, and the basic challenge is accordingly taken to consist in explaining how the gap between the self and the other can be bridged. By contrast, in the psychoanalytic tradition, the central task is considered to lie in explaining how such a gap is established in the first place. My article develops this latter idea. I focus on the infant’s early experience of care, show how the presence of the caregiver can be interprete…

Sense experience and differentiation : Husserl on bodily awareness

This article outlines the basic ingredients of Husserl’s theory of bodily awareness. It first analyses the concepts of hyletic and kinesthetic sensibility, and illustrates the interwovenness and equiprimordiality of Me and not-Me in Husserl’s account. Second, it shows how the concept of the lived body emerges from this complex sensible foundation. Thirdly, it argues that, as the area of intersection between the Me and the not-Me, bodily awareness is the initial locus of differentiation between Me and not-Me: an area where the experiential distinction between the Me and the not-Me is constantly negotiated. peerReviewed