Beyond the Use of the Object: Care and Constructive Activity in Winnicott’s Stage of Concern
Presented by Stephen Seligman
4 CEUs
Dates: March 20, April 10 2026
Time: 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST
Fee: $200
Abstract
Winnicott’s paper on “the development of the capacity for concern” is a neglected masterpiece---the essential companion to “the use of the object.” While that better-known paper stresses destruction, the “concern paper” shows how care and constructive activity are an essential part of the emergence from the transitional phase, toward a more robust way of living with reality. There is a powerful clinical implication here—that therapists’ attention to patients’ positive interests offers a strong pathway for significant therapeutic progress.
This two-session seminar will offer a close reading of that paper, starting with its main idea about how an integrated sense of being a person with an outside world is both “found and created” through hands-on activity with objects—both animate and inanimate, psychic and actual. Winnicott’s interest in positive motives is also a call for a reworking of Klein’s “depressive position.” Along with clinical implications, we will explore the theoretical and historical context of the paper.
Learning Objectives
Examine how concern for the object develops as the infant begins to experience the caregiver as a separate being.
Discuss how guilt, empathy and the wish to repair emerge as a part of this concern.
Explore how focusing on the patient’s positive motives, desires and capacities influences the therapeutic process.