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The purview of Winnicott's work is difficult to imagine. In the nearly 50 years of his professional career, Winnicott occupied an astonishing variety of positions in the medical, psychoanalytic, and social service establishments of his day: psychoanalyst, pediatrician, consultant, supervisor, BBC broadcaster, administrator, letter writer, teacher, and writer. He ran an influential ward at Paddington Green Hospital in London where he saw between 20,000 and 60,000 mother–infant dyads throughout his life and dazzled students, supervisees, and audiences with his astonishing ability to understand and communicate with young children. He analyzed and supervised people who would be important in the British Middle Group: Margaret Little, Harry Guntrip, Enid Balint, and Marion Milner. He was president of the British Psychoanalytic Society, as well as being one the most famous pediatricians in England in the postwar period. In the context of his role as public pediatrician
(he was in many ways the Dr. Spock of England) he gave a popular series of radio addresses to the BBC, and worked with Anna Freud in the Child Evacuation scheme during World War II, helping to relocate children vulnerable to bombing during the Blitz. Winnicott used each of these perches as an observational vantage point, and saw in each of these kinds of relationships—intrapsychic, dyadic, triangular, small group, organization, community civic body, nation—an enormous variety of experiences of dependence, freedom, passionate antagonism, terrified compliance, and ruthless love.
Winnicott transformed observations and experiences into the concepts that are the theoretical and clinical air that contemporary psychoanalysts breathe: transference as potential space, the centrality of play and creativity in psychological meaning making, the in-dwelling of the psyche in the soma, the development of the capacity to be alone, the good-enoughness of maternal experience, object relating versus object use, and so on. Wi