A Beholder's Share ─ Essays on Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Imagination

A sense of reality is evoked in the unpredictable space between imagination and adaptation. The world calls forth something in each of us—a beholder’s share—which in turn calls forth something in the world. Though usually viewed as opposites, imagination and reality make uneasy but necessary bedfellows.

Part I of A Beholder’s Share shows how fantasy generates novelty by creating versions of what is already known, while imagination allows what seems familiar to be seen afresh. Goldman’s essays offer unexpected takes on common clinical encounters: clashes of belief, the search for generational dialogue, the awkward discomfort of feeling like a fake, the problem of how and when to end analysis, the strains of working with psychotic anxieties.

Part II, ‘Winnicott’s Living Legacy,’ illuminates Winnicott’s preoccupation with difficulties inherent in contact with reality. These chapters bring to life Winnicott’s personal struggle with an area of experience his own two analyses failed to touch, the tangled relationship with Masud Khan, his recognition of dissociation as "a queer kind of truth," and how Romantic poets shaped Winnicott’s view of what is felt as real.

Bringing together Dodi Goldman’s seminal and new writings, A Beholder’s Share will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of the arts, literature, and humanities.

Dodi Goldman is a Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty of the William Alanson White Institute and has a private practice in New York. He is a former book review editor of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis and author of In Search of the Real: The Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott.