Winnicott on aggression, idealization, and the painful discovery that another person exists outside our control.
There is a peculiar pattern in some relationships.
One moment, the other person is extraordinary.
Perfect. Brilliant. Understanding. Unlike anyone else.
Then something changes.
Suddenly, the same person is disappointing, worthless, selfish, or fundamentally inadequate.
The usual psychoanalytic explanation involves splitting: the difficulty of holding good and bad aspects of the same person together in a single, emotionally stable representation.
Idealization protects the good object from contamination by its bad qualities. Devaluation does the reverse.
But Donald Winnicott's late paper The Use of an Object (1969) offers another way of looking at this pattern.
Perhaps the movement from idealization to destruction is sometimes more than a defense.
Perhaps it is also an unconscious question:
Is there actually someone there, beyond what I imagine you to be?
Relating to an object is not the same as using it
Winnicott distinguishes between object relating and object usage.
The terminology can sound rather cold. To use another person?
But he isn't describing exploitation.
He is describing something essential to genuine relationships: the ability to encounter another person as someone who exists independently of our wishes, fantasies, and projections.
In object relating, the object may remain largely subjective.
It is experienced through the individual's internal world, shaped by omnipotent fantasy.
In a psychological sense, the object is still mine.
It exists as I imagine it.
In object usage, something changes.
The object is discovered as external.
Separate.
Possessing its own qualities, intentions, limitations, and reality.
It can now offer something the subject does not already possess.
Something genuinely other.
But how does the mind make this transition?
Winnicott gives a startling answer.
Through destruction.
Destruction creates the possibility of reality
In Winnicott's account, the subject destroys the object in unconscious fantasy.
Yet the object survives.
It does not disappear.
It does not become whatever the subject demands.
It remains itself.
And precisely through this survival, the object becomes recognizably real.
We might paraphrase the emotional discovery this way:
I tried to destroy you. You survived. Therefore, you exist beyond my control. And now I can truly love you.
This reverses our ordinary understanding of aggression.
Destruction does not necessarily eliminate the object.
In fantasy, followed by the object's survival, it can help establish the object's independent existence.
The crucial distinction is between destruction in unconscious fantasy and actual harm.
Winnicott is not recommending cruelty as a path toward intimacy. He is describing a developmental process through which the other person becomes more than an extension of the self.
Why idealization is not necessarily intimacy
The application to idealization, devaluation, and relationship dynamics below is the author’s interpretive extension of Winnicott’s account, rather than a claim that Winnicott proposed this model in these terms.
Idealization looks like love.
Sometimes it feels even more powerful than love.
The other person is exceptional.
They understand everything.
They never disappoint.
They seem to possess exactly what has always been missing.
But there is a problem.
An idealized person may still be largely a creation of fantasy.
They are loved not entirely for who they are, but for how perfectly they fit an internal image.
The idealized partner remains under a kind of imaginary control.
You are wonderful because you are exactly what I need you to be.
This can feel safe and intoxicating.
But it leaves very little room for another person's independent reality.
And eventually, that reality intrudes.
The partner disagrees.
Fails to understand something.
Has an inconvenient need.
Does not respond as expected.
Suddenly the ideal image begins to crack.
What follows may be experienced as an attack on the object itself.
“If I call you worthless, will you remain yourself?”
Through a Winnicottian lens, devaluation can sometimes be understood as an unconscious test of the object's independence.
Not necessarily a deliberate strategy.
Not necessarily even something the person understands about their own behavior.
But a question enacted through the relationship.
If I attack your value, will you disappear?
Will you retaliate?
Will you become whatever I demand?
Or will you remain a separate person?
This adds another dimension to the familiar oscillation between “you are perfect” and “you are nothing.”
The question is no longer only whether the psyche can integrate good and bad representations.
It is also whether the other person can be encountered outside omnipotent control.
And there are several ways this encounter can fail.
Three ways the object may fail to survive
The following are three interpretive examples, not an exhaustive or universally established taxonomy, and not a taxonomy attributed to Winnicott.
1. Retaliation
The object responds to aggression with aggression.
Punishment.
Humiliation.
Coldness.
A counterattack.
The emotional message may become:
My aggression is dangerous. The relationship can survive only if I suppress it or control the other person.
The object is experienced as threatening rather than reliably separate.
The defensive cycle may begin again.
Idealization, appeasement, distance, renewed attack.
2. Disappearance
The object withdraws.
Physically or emotionally.
It becomes unavailable, collapses, or ceases to respond.
In the subject's fantasy, this may confirm something even more frightening:
My aggression destroys the people I need.
The fantasy of omnipotence remains intact.
The other person did not survive as an independent presence.
They vanished.
And dependence becomes dangerous because needing someone means risking their destruction.
3. Capitulation
This third possibility is particularly interesting.
The object remains present.
But it surrenders its own position.
You're right. I'm terrible. I'll change. Just don't be angry.
It apologizes endlessly.
Agrees with every accusation.
Rearranges its identity around the other's demands.
On the surface, the relationship continues.
But psychologically, something important may have been lost.
The object has not disappeared, yet it has ceased to stand as an independent other.
It has become controllable again.
In this interpretation, the test has failed.
The subject's fantasy of omnipotence remains unchallenged.
And the apparently compliant partner may become the target of even greater contempt.
Not because kindness is inherently unattractive.
But because capitulation cannot establish the independent reality that the subject is unconsciously seeking.
There is, however, an essential distinction: acknowledging a real mistake is not capitulation. Compromise, repair, and genuine apology are ordinary parts of healthy relationships.
The problem arises when a person abandons their own reality simply to preserve the connection.
Survival is not submission
What does it mean for an object to survive?
It does not mean enduring unlimited abuse.
It does not mean remaining in a dangerous relationship.
And it certainly does not mean that one person is responsible for repairing another person's developmental history by tolerating repeated humiliation.
Survival, in the relevant psychological sense, involves maintaining one's own reality without becoming organized entirely around retaliation, collapse, or submission.
Something like:
I understand that you're angry. I remain here as myself. But I will not accept being treated this way.
The other person does not disappear as a subject.
They also do not become an instrument of the attack.
In psychotherapy, this kind of survival takes place within a professional setting, with boundaries, training, and clinical judgment.
In personal relationships, boundaries may sometimes require distance or leaving altogether.
Survival should never be confused with self-sacrifice.
Why the test may repeat
Winnicott also proposed, in his earlier work on the antisocial tendency, that certain destructive behaviors can contain an element of hope.
They may represent an attempt to recover something that was once available in the environment and subsequently lost.
This offers another possible interpretation of repeated relational attacks.
Perhaps the person is not simply recreating an old disappointment.
Perhaps they are also searching for a different outcome.
An object that will remain real.
A relationship that can accommodate anger without being annihilated by it.
An early experience that did not occur, or did not occur reliably enough.
The repeated attack might then carry an unconscious hope:
Maybe this time the other person will survive.
But recognizing that possibility does not make every destructive pattern hopeful, nor does it mean that every attack is a meaningful psychological test.
Sometimes aggression is simply harmful.
Sometimes the relationship is unsafe.
Sometimes leaving is the appropriate response.
Psychoanalytic interpretation helps us ask questions about behavior. It does not excuse that behavior.
The painful paradox of survival
There is one more complication.
What happens if the object actually survives?
Surely the subject should feel relieved.
Not necessarily.
Because encountering a genuinely independent person means losing the comfort of omnipotent fantasy.
The other person cannot be completely controlled.
They have resources, desires, and resilience that do not belong to the subject.
They can give something valuable precisely because they are separate.
And this can awaken difficult feelings.
Dependency.
Envy.
Fear.
Grief for what was missing in earlier relationships.
The discovery of a real other can therefore be both liberating and painful.
From this perspective, an attack might sometimes intensify after an experience of genuine stability.
Not because nothing is changing.
But because something important is changing.
The familiar defenses are being challenged.
A connection to the clinical concept of the negative therapeutic reaction is possible here: improvement itself may provoke resistance or worsening.
Yet this should remain a clinical hypothesis, not a convenient explanation for every escalation.
An intensifying attack is not, by itself, evidence that therapy is working.
It may signal a significant conflict, but it may also signal deterioration, danger, or a need to reconsider the treatment.
The difference cannot be established from the pattern alone.
The other person becomes real when they stop being ours
The deepest insight in Winnicott's formulation may be that genuine love requires the loss of omnipotence.
As long as the other person exists primarily as a projection, they cannot truly surprise us.
They cannot offer anything outside the possibilities we have already created for them.
They may be adored.
Idealized.
Possessed.
But they are not yet fully encountered.
A real other is different.
They disappoint us.
Disagree with us.
Have limits.
Remain separate.
And sometimes survive the destruction of our fantasies about them.
The transition from idealization to genuine recognition can therefore feel like a loss.
The perfect object disappears.
But a real person becomes possible.
And perhaps this is one of the most difficult tasks in intimacy:
To discover that another person is neither the extraordinary creature we first imagined nor the worthless object we later attacked.
They are simply other.
Independent.
Imperfect.
And real.
The end of omnipotence is not the end of love.
It may be where love finally begins.
Theoretical references
- D. W. Winnicott, The Use of an Object (1969), later included in Playing and Reality (1971).
- D. W. Winnicott, The Antisocial Tendency (1956).
- Otto F. Kernberg, writings on splitting, idealization, devaluation, and object relations.
This note develops an interpretive connection between Winnicott's theory, idealization–devaluation dynamics, and clinical resistance. It should not be read as a universal explanation of relational aggression or as guidance to remain in an abusive relationship.