Bion/Winnicott encounter: absence, failure and the negative in the work of Bion and Winnicott

After the death of Freud, a major thrust of the expansion of psychoanalytic theory involved the increasing recognition that the actuality of the emotional functioning of the object,—the primary objects in the infant’s development, the analyst as object in the treatment process—were crucial determinants of developmental and therapeutic outcome. This recognition has been the driving force behind the evolution of various iterations of the role of interaction, inter-affectivity and intersubjectivity in two-person theories of psychic development and therapeutic action. This paper attempts to briefly trace in the work of Bion, Winnicott, Green and the Paris Psychosomatic School not only the effects of traumatic occurrences, but of their negative—i.e., the consequence of the absence of what should have been provided at crucial moments in development but was not.