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Ruthless Winnicott is an extended exploration of the role of ruthlessness in psychic development. That survival is of no use unless it is preceded by a ruthless attack is one of D.W. Winnicott's most resonant paradoxes.
List of contents
Introduction: Ruthless Winnicott and the decolonial project;
Chapter One: We want to be eaten;
Chapter Two: Ruthlessness and idealization;
Chapter Three: Having a good peep: False selves and use of the therapeutic space;
Chapter Four: The weeping couch;
Chapter Five: Masks, slipping;
Chapter Six: Rhodes, falling;
Chapter Seven: Ruthlessness and the missing middle;
Chapter Eight: Decolonizing psychoanalysis
About the author
Sally Swartz, PhD, is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and academic, teaching, supervising and practising in Cape Town, South Africa. She has an enduring interest in the traumatic effects of colonialism, which was the subject of her monograph,
Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century (2015).
Ruthless Winnicott brings together her interest in the history of colonialism in South Africa, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and the decolonial turn.
Summary
Ruthless Winnicott is an extended exploration of the role of ruthlessness in psychic development. That survival is of no use unless it is preceded by a ruthless attack is one of D.W. Winnicott’s most resonant paradoxes.
Additional text
"Deeply immersed in both psychoanalysis and the ubiquitous turbulence of de- and post-colonization, Swartz applies her usual mental rigour and humanity to examining the discourse between individual psychic trauma and its relevance in collective trauma. Deconstructing and elaborating on Winnicott’s paradoxical notion of ‘ruthlessness’, she perspicaciously tracks its relevance in the pursuit of subjective freedom and the achievement of a complex state of "ruth". Swartz achieves much in this elegant and sophisticated exploration of theory and lived experience in the dark shadows of colonial horror, finding novel ways of reconceptualizing the challenges we face as psychoanalysts and scholars immersed in deconstructing the long and tragically traumatizing effects of othering and colonization. Ruthless Winnicott is a must read."-Hazel Ipp, PhD, Joint Editor-in Chief, Psychoanalytic Dialogues
"With innovative theoretical commentary and helpful clinical illustration, Sally Swartz offers a unique must read of Winnicott’s concept of ruthlessness, contextualized effectively with Fanon’s conception of the impact of the social register on psychological suffering always understood within categories and hierarchies of power concerning race."-Steven Knoblauch, PhD, author of The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue
"In Ruthless Winnicott, Sally Swartz comes brilliantly to the urgent call for relational psychoanalysis to contribute to the psycho-social-political turmoil of our times. Unmissable."-Victor Doñas, MD, psychoanalyst, Santiago, Chile
