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I have been charmed by this small book.
It is a compilation of several short papers and addresses by Winnicott, some of them given to a radio audience. These are not Winnicott's most famous papers, but they provide an outstanding reading experience. Part of the charm, to me, is that the papers are not major papers. Many are delightful and highly instructive.
When I think of Winnicott, I think of his very important contributions to object relations, his appreciation of countertransference including hate in the countertransference, transitional objects and successor transitional objects, and the concept of the ordinary, good-enough mother, among many other contributions. The contributions in this book touch on these major ones.
The book consists of three parts, two of them previously published, with excellent introductions to each by Benjamin Spock, T. Berry Brazelton, and Stanley Greenspan. I do not find much thematic difference among the three parts, and the book, taken as one book, is very cohesive.
For the most part, the papers in this book are written for ordinary, if devoted, lay-people, and one does not need a psychoanalytic background to understand them. The remarkable aspect of the papers, however, is that they present highly developed and very detailed psychoanalytic concepts in wonderful, comprehensible, jargon-free language. This may reflect