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This book, edited by two of my most admired colleagues, and with chapters by graduates from the British Association of Psychotherapists child and adolescent psychotherapy training (now called Independent Psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Association since the formation of the British Psychotherapy Foundation), was a revelation to me. As someone whose analysis was firmly rooted in the Winnicottian tradition I thought I had a ‘good enough’ working knowledge of Winnicott, but I finished reading this book with a sense that I had known comparatively little of what Winnicott has written. Of course many of Winnicott's renowned statements and ideas are referred to within this book, but the ideas discussed range far beyond the familiar. I came across wonderful things Winnicott had said that I had either never read before or had never slowed down sufficiently to notice the implications of. Indeed, even when the Winnicott concepts being discussed were well known, the chapters here gave them fresh depth through each author's way of thinking about them and the clinical examples used.
The editors invited child and adolescent psychotherapists to write on what a particular Winnicott paper or concept had meant to them. The chapters vary in the amount they overtly refer to and quote Winnicott, with some such as Kitchener's being a masterly weaving together of Winnicott quotations, and her own thoughts and clinical examples; yet even in those chapters which make less direct use of Winnicott he is very present throughout. The influence of his approach, the use of paradox and a willingness to dwell in uncertainty are some of the delights of this book.
As well as the substantive chapters the book benefits from an interesting foreword by Helen Taylor Robinson and a Prologue by Adam Phillips (2007), taken from the