Dr Winnicott takes a collection of lectures and papers directed towards widely varying audiences ranging from the medical profession to the listening public between and and welds them into a homogeneous unit. From these talks to doctors and social workers, teachers and midwives, there emerges a composite picture of the growing child from birth to adolescence; the development of the family into which the child is born; and the formation of a democracy out of the sum total of these families.

The first of the two main themes is the continuous struggle between the opposite needs for dependence and independence in the growing organism. This begins as soon as the infant grows through his ‘double dependence’ to the awareness of helplessness and