Rodman, Robert F. (Ed.) The Spontaneous Gesture: Selected Letters of D. W. Winnicott. Cambridge, Massachusetts,  Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp.  xxxiii + 2ii. + 211.

The selected letters of Winnicott, carefully edited and made available for the first time, offer a glimpse of the interior life of Winnicott and of his relationship with the powerful personalities of the generation of analysts following Freud. These letters, it seems to me, occur within the space between self and other so vital to Winnicott's thinking, and provide a unique perspective for understanding how the concept of transitional phenomena may have grown, in part, out of his own creative struggle with the psychoanalytic movement of his time. ‘Experience,’ he writes to Roger Money-Kyrle, ‘is a constant trafficking in illusion, a repeated reaching to the interplay between creativity and what the world has to offer’ (p. 43). It is precisely this experience between ‘creativity and what the world has to offer’ that Winnicott writes from and about in these letters. What Winnicott discovered, I am suggesting, is the transitional quality inherent in letter-writing; with these letters, as with other transitional phenomena, he was able to create a form where new experience could be lived and original thought developed. Within the transitional space of the letters, he was able to examine the dangers of some fundamental analytic assumptions, including the use of interpretation and the near-exclusive emphasis on the intraphysic realm.

Of the 825 extant letters written by Winnicott, Rodman has chosen 126 letters from 1919-1969 most pertinent to our understanding of Winnicott as a theorist and analyst. In addition, he has provided a sensitive biographical introduction, a glossary