The Place Where We Live: Inside, Outside, Playing and Using in Perpetuity: The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 8, 1967-1968. Edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016.

Among the many brilliant elements of Winnicott's writing is the tapestry of interwoven themes that papers present when taken together. Volume 8 of The Collective Works of Donald Winnicott includes many of his most important theoretical and clinical papers.

There are at least three periods of his work in which monumental changes in theory are introduced. In the first period, summarized by the statement “there is no such thing as an infant” (Winnicott 1941), he is creating an entirely different way of understanding an infant, one that necessarily includes the environment. In the next phase, through introducing us to transitional phenomena and the original me/not-me possession, he is suggesting something in between what is inside and outside, between the intra-and the interpsychic. His final phase of work, the subject of this volume, includes his emphasis on playing as therapeutic action, as well as his major theoretical revision of Freud's and Klein's views on aggression. In this final phase, encapsulated in this volume, it is striking how themes of playing and using the object, as well as his ideas about interpretation and culture, are interwoven in each of the seminal papers.

In the years 1967-1968, Winnicott elaborated his theory of play as central to the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. He wrote an astounding paper on interpretation in psychoanalysis (Winnicott 1968a) in which he essentially formalized the concept of ontological meanings of interpretation, even as they had been in development during his contribution to transitional phenomena , and as far back as his paper on primitive emotional development . In the paper on interpretation

he quietly presented an intersubjective view of the analytic situation in which patients acclimate to their analyst's styles and limitations. By the end of this period he produced “The Use of the Object,” which delineated an entirely new view of aggression and a formulation on the capacity to use the object. In typically Wi