Introduction: Concluding the JAPA Series on Winnicott's Collected Works

It is fitting that Lesley Caldwell has written this final entry in our eleven-essay review of The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. As editor of the Collected Works, along with Helen Taylor Robinson, she is wonderfully situated to recount the history of how this monumental project came to fruition and the circuitous path it took to reach completion.

Caldwell witnessed the evolution of Winnicott's international reputation and notes how his work took on different saliences in various analytic cultures. In a sense, there are multiple Winnicotts—each framed by the controversies and politics of the society in which the work was encountered. Caldwell speculates how different these JAPA review essays might have been had they been written by British analysts who, like Winnicott, lived through the tempestuous intellectual environment of the British Psychoanalytical Society. It is a measure of Winnicott's greatness that he touches on so many of the issues that have consumed analytic thinkers regardless of their profoundly different analytic cultures. And our reviewers have captured, as well, his vast reach beyond the consulting room, from pediatricians and teachers to parents and the greater public.

This review project began in mid-2019 and took almost five years to complete. None of this would have been possible without the support, generosity, and wisdom of JAPA editor-in-chief Mitchell Wilson and the superb book review editors Anne Adelman and Jennifer Stuart. We owe them immense gratitude.

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