Winnicott, D. W. The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London:  Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1965. Pp.  295.

… He has interesting views on the aetiology of the psychoses which he links closely with experiences in the first year of life. His years of work as consultant in a London children's hospital with a strongly local character enabled him to follow the development of some of his child patients through to adulthood and even to the time when they brought their own children to him, and he can speak with unusual authority of the stage of life between birth and two years. He insists that a young baby can only be considered in relation to its mother, and that psychologically they form a unit from which the baby gradually emerges as a separate individual, which he calls reaching ‘unit status’. This is close to Jung's view of the psychic interrelation of parents and children, but Winnicott puts the emergence from this relationship much earlier than Jung does, granting the healthy child a considerable degree of individuality by the end of the first year.…

… Ego distortions are discussed in terms of a true and a false self, concepts to which Winnicott attaches considerable importance, but which do not seem well-named since the false self is clearly the result of precocious ego development and the true self evades any precise description. It is not the self as understood by Jungians, though since it is bound up with the experience of continuity of being and the achievement of integration, there are clearly links in this concept with that of the individuation process and also with Fordham's concept of the original self.

The book is written in straightforward language which gives a sense of spontaneity to the text, thus making for easy reading. Its wisdom and the attitude of the author towards his patients should commend it to analytical psychologists.

(From JAP 12, 2, July 1967)