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Volume 4 of Winnicott's collected works (1952-1955) covers the period in his writing in which he developed, presented, struggled with, and even pleaded for a true understanding of his unique way of thinking about the psychoanalytic study of psychosis and early psychic development, and the closely related crucial issue of regression in analytic work. It also contains the first published version of “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” from 1953. In his personal life, Winnicott's marriage to Clare Britton on December 28, 1951 (mistakenly noted in Volume 5 as 1955), with whom he had been working since 1943, marked the beginning of the lively last twenty years of his life.
It is beyond my scope here to address the broad and rich array of thoughts that arise on reading this volume and Dominique Scarfone's evocative introduction, which proposes a different way of approaching Winnicott—reading him slowly in order to capture the original mode, logic, and movement of his highly personal psychoanalytic language in expressing his ideas, and in this way putting aside one's previous knowledge of “Winnicott” rather than rushing toward what is already familiar. I have chosen to examine slowly the radical evolution of Winnicott's clinical thinking into the launching of what I consider a revolutionary approach in clinical psychoanalysis. This is an essential point for me (Eshel 2013b, 2017b, 2019). Winnicott has exerted a profound influence on the theory and practice of clinical psychoanalysis over the past sixty years, and his groundbreaking ideas have been widely investigated by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists around the world. Yet it seems to me that the revolutionary meaning of his most radical ideas has, in certain ways, been evaded, underestimated, or criticized and rejected.