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. Playing and reality. London, Tavistock Publications, 1971 pp. xiii + 169. £2.10 in U.K. only.
. Therapeutic consultations in child psychiatry. London, The Hogarth Press, 1971, ed. Masud Khan. pp. 410. £4.50.
‘You really seem to have read this book’, wrote the author when I had sent him a copy of my review (Plaut, 1960) of his collected papers with the sub-title ‘Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis’ (Winnicott, 1958). Confronted with the present volumes published during the year of his death, one cannot do justice to Winnicott's opus without mentioning that his influence has been felt and appreciated by analysts of all directions and that he effectively reached professional groups whose work is concerned with psychotherapy in the wider sense, especially psychiatry and social work. Indeed, if I were asked to give his latest and last books a sub-title, it would be ‘From psychoanalysis to psychotherapy’, adding, in small letters ‘Not for imitators’.
This warning launches me right into the centre of a dilemma: where to begin? For indeed these are not easy books to review. In spite of the first being a slender volume with a certain amount of repetition, the author is a master of incisive and condensed phrases which then become infinitely quotable by tyros and professionals alike.
He is such an artist with words (as indeed in other media) that he tempts one to imitate or repeat before one has, by hard work, found a way of fully comprehending his thoughts. ‘Are you a victim of the Winnicott myth?’ he asked me once, showing me that he was fully aware of his fate of having become a legend in his lifetime. But his question was also timely and therapeutic, giving me back my critical faculty. To his colleagues he gave what he had discovered generously and kindly and then told them, in various suitable ways, to push off and find their own creative bit, rather than become compliant with any school or teacher, including himself. Nothing could be more o