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This book describes ‘psychoanalysis on demand’. That suggests that psychoanalysis is to be made available when Gabrielle demands it on behalf of Piggle—Piggle being the neurotic part of Gabrielle. Gabrielle is two and a half years old when treatment begins and, it seems, is quite able to undertake this project. Psychoanalysis is not, however, always available: either Winnicott is not free or Gabrielle's request is not judged, by her parents, to be sufficiently urgent and perhaps ‘practical’ difficulties intervene also. Therefore the project cannot always be strictly implemented. However this may be, the result is sixteen interviews in two and a half years, by which time Gabrielle is five years and two months old and her transference neurosis has been resolved.
Besides Winnicott's detailed and moving descriptions of his interviews with the various ‘persons’ that appear and the various rôles in which he is expected to reveal himself, there are numerous letters from the mother which tell about Gabrielle's progress or the reverse, which fill in the gaps between interviews and reveal her and her husband's perceptive tolerance of Gabrielle's complex and often incomprehensible behaviour.
Donald Winnicott was an intensely practical dreamer. As a pediatrician he had to deal with large numbers of patients, in an ordinary out-patient department, many of whom showed clear evidence of mental disturbance. From this grew Therapeutic consultations, based on the principle of how little needed to be done. Now he has added The Piggle, which considers how much is possible when the members of a family cannot adapt themselves to daily psychoanalysis without disturbing their whole life.
The result was much more than the compromise which might have been expected. The Piggle is a challenging document on many counts. Winnicott maintains that:
There is only one satisfactory psychotherapy and that is psychoanalysis, by which he means that therapy is best conducted by those who can appreciate the