You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was a distinguished psychoanalyst working in London, first as a physician, a paediatrician, and later as a psychoanalyst. He was twice President of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London and sometime physician in charge of the Child Department of that Institute. He held many other important posts in child psychiatry and psychology. In his many broadcast talks he spanned the strictly professional world of medicine and psychiatry and the ordinary everyday world of families with children. This book was written in 1954 and was worked on continuously until his death in 1971. It was based on two synopses of his ideas which were originally in draft form. His later notes and intentions to make changes are published in the form of footnotes. We are indebted to Clare Winnicott who worked on the book before her death, and to Christopher Bollas, Madeleine Davis and Ray Shepherd who continued to work through Winnicott's notes to incorporate as much as possible of his reflective comments on the material in the book.
It has been a strange experience to read this book, as it is based on lectures which Winnicott gave to post-graduate students at the London School of Economics, of which I was one. He was the first psychoanalyst I had met and he made a lasting impression on me. He did not lecture in the ordinary sense of the word. His lectures certainly were not the kind in which you could write notes, as Clare Winnicott remarks in her preface. The lectures were largely based on his forty years' experience as a paediatrician and a psychoanalyst and developed out of his work with children and their parents at Paddington Green Hospital for Children, with other children he had met during his travels abroad, and from his work with analytic patients. At the London School of Economics most of his students were totally involved in his descriptions of the experiences of his patients and in his comments on the material. In our heightened state of empathic feeling