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The work opens with a very warm and appreciative foreword by Sir Peter Tizard which accurately sets the scene. In it professionals are urged to be aware of the vital and sensitive part they play as workers involved with children and their mothers, because they must be able to facilitate and enable mothers and their babies to develop their own relationship. The early phase is seen as crucial in the development of the individual, and professionals cannot, must not take over from mothers. Dr Winnicott is described as fully appreciating this and striving to protect mothers and their babies from over-zealous or intrusive professionals.
Winnicott died in 1971. It is of interest to note that in the U.K. in 1987/8 Free Association Books published two further books of his, posthumously, with the help of Clare Winnicott before she died. The first, Human Nature, was an unfinished work; an attempt, rather like Freud's Project, to produce an overview, to bring together Winnicott's ideas, concepts, understanding to provide a structure, a framework within which one could understand human beings, human nature. But this was never completed; the early chapters showed what might have been but they needed editing and rewriting and the later chapters petered out, leaving the reader feeling tantalized, frustrated and irritated.
So one comes to Babies and Their Mothers ; at once it feels different and one breathes a sigh of relief. The book is not the publication of further incomplete writing. It is the bringing together of a series of talks given by Dr Winnicott with the addition of some published papers that are not widely available.
There are nine chapters, each one of which is a talk or a paper and so each is complete in itself. There are no links, one with another, except that despite the topic each does say quite similar things; there is considerable overlap whatever the topic, the focus of that talk or paper. Chapter one is a talk and one can imagine the audience being held