Three Books by and about Winnicott

Winnicott. By Adam Phillips. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 1988. Pp. 180.

The Spontaneous Gesture: Selected Letters of D. W. Winnicott. Edited by F. Robert Rodman. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 1987. Pp. 211.

Psychoanalytic Explorations. By D. W. Winnicott, edited by Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 1989. Pp. 602.

Since his death in 1971 the name of Donald Winnicott has assumed an ever more prominent place in the pantheon of modern psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. More than any other figure of the recent past, with the possible exception of Erik Erikson, he has assumed a place in the consciousness of the lay public as a result of his unique literary style, his tireless efforts to communicate with general and non-psychiatric professional audiences, and the exceptional evocativeness of certain of his developmental concepts. Such terms as 'good enough mothering', 'true and false self', and 'transitional objects' have become a part of the mental furniture of educated people in the Anglophone world and increasingly in other countries as well.

Winnicott's role in psychoanalysis was unique in a number of ways. He came to it, as he pointed out repeatedly, from paediatrics, and he continued to work as a paediatrician and in paediatric settings long after he obtained his psychoanalytic qualifications. In the context of what appears to an outsider as the Byzantine politics of British psychoanalysis, he sought to serve—and, in large measure did serve—as an honest broker between the warring Freudian and Kleinian camps. As such, he was one of the pioneering members and sages of the 'Middle Group', whose 'object-relations' approach draws heavily on his teachings. And the idiosyncrasies of his way of writing—his addiction to paradox, his dedication to the use of 'ordinary' language, and his unsparing self-exposure—make his papers unmistakably his own. No sentence of a Winnicot