“The Moon of the Magic Casement”: Transitional Phenomena, the Moon, and D. W. Winnicott's Death: The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 9, 1969-1971. Edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016.

What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death?

And so with Volume 9 (1969-1971) of D. W. Winnicott's Collected Works, we come to the end: “1971 - Dies of a coronary in January” (CW, Chronology, p. 402).

This fatal clotting was the last knot in a string of heart attacks beginning in 1948, including a serious coronary Winnicott suffered after presenting “The Use of the Object” to the New York Psychoanalytic Society on November 12, 1968. He was hospitalized in New York for five weeks, returning to London just before the dawn of 1969.

Volume 9 breathes under the two-year shadow of Winnicott's hovering death, and cannot be read outside of that certainty. At the same time, the volume pulses with a life of speculation, revision, contemplation, and completion. Of particular note are the papers that Winnicott worked to collect in Playing and Reality (1971), including his final revision of “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” originally presented at a scientific meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1951 (CW 3:6:6), then revised and published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1953 (CW 4:2:21), and republished in Winnicott's 1958 book, Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis (CW 5:4:24). Winnicott's twenty-year reworking of his ideas about transitional phenomena points to the centrality of these observations in his theorizing about human “growth” (his preferred term), along with his propositions about therapeutic action.

Transitional phenomena, and the consideration thereof, have also become a cornerstone of modern psychoanalytic thought. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” has been the most popular psychoanalytic journal article for many years running, requested 3,755 times in 2020 alone (PEP Web). Playing and Reality sits on most every analyst's bookshelf; my copy, read and reread, is held together by masking tape