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This book is the most recent volume of the Winnicott Studies Monograph Series. It is the third to be edited by Lesley Caldwell and with its exciting title appears to open a fresh line of thinking about Winnicott.
My understanding of Winnicott's work has been that it is centred on what is needed for human individuality to be sustainable. It tends to bypass the impact of sexual difference, the significance of the Oedipus complex, the role of the father, and the significance of sexuality and the drives. Instead, much of his focus is on the prerequisites for ‘in-dwelling’, the location of the self in a body, with the possibility of a unit self, of integration and de-integration, made possible by maternal preoccupation and early care-giving. Without this, instinctual experiences and demands can never be other than overwhelming. This work privileges infantile experience and the role of the mother in early life as the central predictive indicator for mental well-being. Despite his idiosyncratic style these preoccupations situate Winnicott within the British tradition of psychoanalytic thought, rooted in empiricism and humanism. His observations of thousands of mothers and children in his paediatric work, his accounts of his psychoanalytic work with his patients, and some of theirs of being analysed by him provide a unique record of his central concerns: feeling real, psyche-soma, being able to play and so on.
The cover blurb says that ‘His writings contain unexplored insights into sexuality and it is these hidden insights that prompted Lesley Caldwell to invite papers from leading analysts to expand upon them’. And it is true that she has gathered some very eminent contributors for this book - Mario Bertolini, Lesley Caldwell, Andreas Giannakoulas, André Green, Joyce McDougall, Francesca Neri, Adam Phillips, Helen Taylor Robinson, Dominique Scarfone and Maggie Schaedel.
In her introduction Lesley Caldwell makes no mention of how the book came into being. It isn't clear whethe