Winnicott's Notion of ‘Holding’ as Applied to Serious Physical Illness

Professor of English Literature and the Health Humanities at King's College London. He is also the codirector of the Centre for the Humanities and Health there. He was a founder member of the New Imago Group and is an academic member of the British Psychoanalytic Council. He is also a Founding Scholar of the Freud Museum. He worked for many years in epidemiology and public health, and has a strong interest in all aspects of the psychic aura of physical illness. His main interest is in literature and medicine. He has previously written on the application of psychoanalytic psychosomatics to first-person memoirs of illness, drawing especially on the writings of the Italian post-Bionians such as Ferrari and Lombardi. He is the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (2004). He is currently writing a book (with Derek Bolton of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience) called Shared Life and the Experience of Illness.