Playing with Winnicott: Squiggling Through Therapeutic Consultations: The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 10. Therapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry. Edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016.

During the final two years of his life, Winnicott worked with a sense of urgency to complete several key projects including this volume, originally published in 1971, just eight months after his death. Throughout his career, Winnicott held a multitude of one- or two-session consultations with children of varying ages. These consultations, or first interviews, held a special significance for him: “I was struck by the frequency with which the children had dreams of me the night before attending” (p. 30).1 They brought “their imaginative equipment” and thus afforded the possibility of an encounter that Winnicott characterized as a “sacred moment” (p. 30). Winnicott discovered to his “amusement” that he was “fitting in with a preconceived notion” of who he was to be for the child, and realized that he had entered a very special role that he would later come to call a “subjective object” (p. 30).

The child brings an illusion of expectation to the setting that meets the reality of the doctor's being there, responding to the child's belief in the possibility of being understood. Winnicott notes that “in this role of subjective object, which rarely outlasts the first or first few interviews, the doctor has a great opportunity for being in touch with the child” (p. 30). It is in this setting that the child can bring and display “the current problem or the emotional conflict or the pattern of strain which obtains at this moment of the client's life” (p. 32).