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.
D. W. Winnicott was preoccupied with the nature of the relationship between the individual and the environment, in varying degrees and at varying stages of development, including that early stage when there is no ‘space between’. The environment is a human one which evolves and changes, but its quality depends on its fit or lack of fit with the growing child's psychological and emotional perceptions and needs. Winnicott found it necessary to postulate a split in the personality as he developed his thinking about its structure, which he formulated in terms of the true and false self. In this collection of twenty-four essays Winnicott's theory is closely linked with practice. The authors wrestle with the paradoxical nature of man, in good and evil, life and death, and in the unthinkable essence of feared destruction of the psyche through impingement, intrusion and the terrors of annihilation. The two editors, both clinical psychologists, work in treatment and teaching settings and have also contributed to the collection. Undoubtedly, their clinical experience has enabled them to choose a selection of essays which appeal to practising clinicians.
The book is arranged in four sections: theory, transitional phenomena, false self organisation, and the psychotherapeutic holding environment. It addresses itself to the failures of the facilitating environment. As Winnicott says, babies do not remember being well enough held, but only the traumatic experience of not being well enough held. For good handling and holding facilitate the maturational processes, whereas repeated bad holding interrupts them, because the baby (and later the adult) has to react to failures of adaptation to his or her basic needs. This view underpins Winnicott's use of the mother/child relationship as a model for psychoanalytic treatment.
In the first section of the book Winnicott is placed firmly in the middle group of the British school of psychoanalysis, which is strongly influenced by Klein but comm