You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Winnicott once said that no sooner would he begin reading a paper than he would want to write one himself. It is certainly an effect that reading his work can have on others as well. Yet at the same time it can be hard to pull oneself away from a Winnicott text. This is especially the case reading through Volume 6 of the Collected Works, where one can meander through the full range and variety of his output, with pleasurable surprises around every corner. All of this makes the position of reviewer challenging: how to somehow give an account of the protean thinking; and how to restrain oneself from going off on some spontaneous speculations of one's own?
The well-known innovations of Winnicott's world of thought—“play” and “transitional objects” and “holding environment”—have already entered the canon, and his work is quoted everywhere and by practically everyone these days. Yet the effect of reading this volume, which covers the period 1960-1963, is of encountering germinal ideas whose potential and full impact are yet to be realized. Maybe the not-yet-saturated quality of his writing is a reason why his thinking has remained so vital and claims the interest of so many.
This was not only a remarkably creative period for Winnicott, but a time when he expanded beyond his primary concern with child development and the clinical environment, writing highly consequential papers that proposed bold new formulations on communication and on the sense of aliveness and realness in self-experience. Always eschewing abstract systemization,1 Winnicott typically built a paper around a singular topic