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Winnicott, as Ogden (2001) has recently observed, is unusual among psychoanalytic writers in the interdependence of his ideas and his manner of expressing them, and unique in his power of poetic evocation. Steven Tuber's new introduction to Winnicott's thought gives this appreciation of his writing a central place. Tuber starts from Ogden's insight that Winnicott “does not use language to arrive at conclusions; rather he uses language to create experiences in reading that are inseparable from the ideas he is presenting, or more accurately, the ideas he is playing with” (Ogden, 2001, p. 299). While conceptualizing his book as a ‘primer,’ Tuber aims mainly to extend and assist this ‘playing through reading’ for the student of Winnicott. As he acknowledges, his book is not a work of criticism, nor is it “even a neutral examination” (p. 228), for he is, by his own admission, biased by his love for Winnicott's work. Rather, the book is an effort to capture in written form an experience that Tuber tries to give to the students who take his graduate seminar on Winnicott: ‘playing’ with Winnicott's writings and ideas in order not simply to learn what he said, but to achieve a personal and creative understanding. Tuber enthusiastically shares with the reader his experience of Winnicott as our field's preeminent good-enough mother, and in lovingly identifying with him seems to convey a hope that this book will be experienced by the reader as the proverbial ‘good feed,’ giving rise to both satisfaction and increased internal (therapeutic) capacities. Tuber writes as though he is engaged in an animated conversation with the reader, a conversation in which his goal is to share his appreciation of Winnicott in order that we may be ‘expanded’ by Winnicott's ideas as he feels he has been. In his clear and thorough exposition of the material, highly organized yet partaking of Winnicottian themes of paradox, play, destruction and creation, Tuber largely achieves this aim.
While Tuber'