Donald W. Winnicott

It would be wrong to say that Donald Winnicott was a many-sided man: in reality he was a man of many depths and there is so much to be said about him at any level that it is difficult to know which aspects of his life and work and personality to select.

I was greatly touched and honoured when Mrs Winnicott asked me to speak1 about him. My qualifications for doing so are twofold and neither is unique. Firstly, I am a paediatrician, and paediatrics was Donald Winnicott's primary discipline within medicine, and secondly, in the words of Ben Jonson about his friend William Shakespeare, 'I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.'

I first got to know Donald Winnicott 22 years ago when I became a physician at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital. I went there with a poor opinion of the general usefulness of child psychiatry but I soon found that however difficult and damaging a child's past and present circumstances the situation was always changed for the better once Dr Winnicott became involved. At first I attributed this to his obvious high intelligence, his intuitive powers and the fact that he was 'good with children'; but while all these attributions were correct, I later realized—and I am sure he would have liked me to say so—that his success also owed much to his professional discipline and his training as a psychoanalyst. Donald Winnicott had the most astonishing powers with children. To say that he understood children would to me sound false and vaguely patronizing; it was rather that children understood him and that he was at one with them. He used to allow some of his younger colleagues at Paddington Green to be present while he interviewed a child. The presence of others would be regarded by most doctors as prohibitively disturbing, but the fact was that within a few minutes of a child entering his consulting room both the child and Dr Winnicott were oblivious of the presence of anyone else. A good example of