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It is a happy event that the first systematic presentation of Donald Winnicott's theories and clinical understanding should be Harry Karnac's first original publication. He is to be congratulated for his evident skill as a publisher and for his courage in launching into this new venture at a time of economic recession.
This book, written and produced with much clarity, simplicity and directness, seems to me to be imbued with the style of the man whose work it sets out to discuss. The print itself is distinct and readable; the organisation of the material has an elegant logic, and this is reflected in the typographical lay-out of the table of contents.
The authors, Madeleine Davis and David Wallbridge, before they embark on the account of Winnicott's psychological theories and contributions, give a short account of his family and professional background and the pattern of his general attitudes and ideas.
Analytical psychologists cannot help but be fascinated by Winnicott's thinking, because so much of it feels familiar to us, and so many of his basic assumptions, although expressed in deceptively simple form, seemingly echo those of Jung.
His concept of the ‘self’ for instance, though not identical with Jung's self, nevertheless reflects the value he places, as did Jung, on the development of personal identity, without which we cannot feel real. His ‘self’, resting on the emergence of self-consciousness, leads him on to the notion, familiar to us, of ‘inner psychic reality’ which he thinks of as mediating the experience of continuity of being.
As is well known, Winnicott elaborated further his concept of the self when he distinguished a ‘true self from a ‘false’ or a ‘compliant’ self. But he came to recognise that there must also exist a function that enables man to develop ‘social manners’ and the capacity to ‘adapt’ and to ‘compromise’; and so he posited a function that closely resembles Jung's persona and which he, Winnicott, described as the ‘compliant aspect of the t