Reflections on the JAPA Reviews of Winnicott's Collected Works

Thanks to Adrienne Harris and Phillip Blumberg for their inspired idea of having Winnicott's Collected Works reviewed volume by volume in JAPA. The project has resulted in a distinctive contribution to Winnicott scholarship on the history and evolution of psychoanalysis and its contemporary parameters. These review essays testify to the international interest in Winnicott's theoretical and clinical sophistication, his central place in postwar English psychoanalysis, and his later influence worldwide, but they also draw attention to his popularity now in the United States and a certain interest in previous decades that deserves systematic exploration and research.

Apart from two long-established Israeli Winnicott scholars, Ofra Eshel and Emanuel Berman, and Giuseppe Civitarese, known for his work on Bion and the Italian development of field theory, the reviewers are American. As a direct result of the Collected Works' publication in 2016, a volume of papers edited by Joseph Aguayo discussing Winnicott's visits to the U.S. in the 1960s will be published next year. It includes two earlier papers by American analysts, Francis Baudry and Nellie Thompson, which come out of a very different moment but are equally relevant today.

I hope there will be continuing detailed investigation of the American Winnicott (or Winnicotts), especially with regard to the general shifts that have occurred in psychoanalytic practice and scholarship in what may be regarded as distinctly American schools of thought.

Helen Taylor Robinson and I inherited the Collected Works somewhat reluctantly following the untimely death of its recently appointed general editor, the American analyst and scholar Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Before her appointment in 2011, the idea of a Collected Works had had a

checkered, long discussed history, though its importance had been insisted on by Christopher Bollas, and then by Jan Abram. Both were instrumental in the decision made by the Winnicot