Culture versus Politics: Winnicott’s Perception of Emotions in the Public Sphere

Donald Winnicott’s work has been monitored for its political implications. Scholars have noted a possible difficulty in translating the psychoanalytical insights Winnicott offers into ideas for the public and civic world. It consists in the carrying over the rationale of care, recognition and play based on the nursing dyad into the area of collective decision and the potentiality of coercion and violence it entails. While Winnicott insists that 'home is where we start from' and that citizenship, and ultimately, world citizenship, are the products of healthy socialization at home, he still explicitly recognizes the decisional and coercive dimension of politics, and thinks that its persistence is inevitable, as are its institutional forms in governments, borders and states. How can Winnicott hold both views – the anticipation of an expansion from the dynamic of early care to the furthest extents of the public world on the one hand, and the realization that this dynamic is ultimately limited by the inevitability of decision, coercion and violence, on the other? Scholars have responded by criticizing Winnicott for being inconsistent or for wishing to preserve the distinction of a secluded and gendered home life, or alternatively praised him for suggesting a vision in which the caring posture of the parent can radically change the alienated arena of politics where selfish agents vie with each other. Taking these suggestions into account, I offer another interpretation, centered around the idea of an expanding private sphere. If the civic arena where coercion is a central fact remains inevitable, Winnicott can also envisage its gradual domestication by a growing web of exchanges based on the transitional play capacities acquired at home. The culture generated by these exchanges is expected to outgrow and circumvent the civic sphere to the point where politics, while never going extinct, becomes less central and less threatening. This vision – pluralist and global rather than conventionally liberal and internationalist – was shared by influential midcentury thinkers, an occurrence that points to Winnicott's ability to resonate with his period and elaborate its concerns through the use of psychoanalytical insights.