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This book consists of twenty-three papers given by the author to a variety of audiences between 1958 and 1963. Inevitably, there is a good deal of repetition, but the subject is approached each time in a slightly different way so that the reader eventually gets a clear idea of Winnicott's basic postulates and the way they can be applied analytically. The book is divided into two parts, the first being papers on development, the second on theory and technique. It covers a diversity of subjects, for instance ‘Counter-transference’ , ‘Training in child psychiatry’ and ‘The mentally ill in your case load’ . The paper on ‘Counter-transference’ is part of a joint symposium to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society in which both analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts took part.
Winnicott is a psychoanalyst whose attitude to his work is far from that which has so often been referred to by Jungians as ‘nothing but’. He writes: ‘We are not only concerned with individual maturity and with the freedom of individuals from mental disorder or from psycho-neurosis; we are concerned with the richness of individuals in terms of… inner psychic reality.’
He has interesting views on the aetiology of the psychoses which he links closely with experiences in the first year of life. His years of work as consultant in a London children's hospital with a strongly local character enabled him to follow the development of some of his child patients through to adulthood and even to the time when they brought their own children to him, and he can speak with unusual authority of the stage of life between birth and two years. He insists that a young baby can only be considered in relation to its mother, and that psychologically they form a unit from which the baby gradually emerges as a separate individual, which he calls reaching ‘unit status’. This is close to Jung's view of the psychic interrelation of parents and children, but Winnicott puts the emergence from this relation