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Ruthless Winnicott: The Role of Ruthlessness in Psychoanalysis and Political Protest is a collection of essays by psychoanalytic psychotherapist and University of Cape Town professor, Sally Swartz, structured around Winnicott's word “ruthless.” The first three chapters focus on the idea of ruthlessness in psychic development, and the next four on the idea of ruthlessness of student political protests in South Africa, specifically at the University of Cape Town (UCT) during the years 2015-2016. The final chapter turns to the question of decolonizing psychoanalysis in South Africa. Grounded in a relational psychoanalytic perspective engaging contemporary U.S. thinkers such as with Lew Aron, Jessica Benjamin, Christopher Bollas, Thomas Ogden, Donna Orange, and Joyce Slochower, Ruthless Winnicott does not engage a relational critique of Winnicott1 but rather provides a sophisticated and nuanced reading of some of Winnicott's paradoxes. For Winnicott, the infant is dependent and demanding, and the mother's needs are disregarded; when the infant gets what she wants she “throws the mother away like an orange peel” (as cited in Swartz, , p. 9). The mother is a slave but a slave who must protect the infant from the mother's own hate. Here Winnicott's ideas have often been understood in terms of a biological necessity. The infant's will to survive requires that the infant sees the mother as simply an extension of itself. When the baby is hungry, the mother magically appears on demand. For Winnicott, there is also development as the infant begins to move to object use from object relating, in other words, becoming separate from the mother (note the counter-intuitive use of the term—object relating reflects the