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Perhaps the most frequent comment made by students of Winnicott when they approach his work is the deceptive nature of his writing, which is at once engaging, provocative, paradoxical and tricksterish. Meaning is found, only then to feel elusive once more. In Reading Winnicott, Caldwell and Joyce bring together fourteen of his papers, which they have selected to explore four central areas of Winnicott's work: the relational environment and the place of infantile sexuality, aggression and destructiveness, illusion and transitional phenomena, and the theory and practice of psychoanalysis with adults and children. They begin by providing a Winnicott chronology, an extremely helpful reference point for the reader, which combines - in table form - dates, a biographical overview of important episodes and events in Winnicott's personal and professional life and his significant publications. This astonishing list confronts the reader with the sheer immensity of Winnicott's oeuvre, writing as he did for both the clinician and the wider public.
Helen Taylor Robinson in her Preface states that it is the distinctiveness of Winnicott's thinking that the authors wish to convey (p. xxii), ‘in order to situate Winnicott within and alongside the psychoanalytic ideas of yesterday and today’ (p. xxi). Hence in their general introduction Caldwell and Joyce begin by exploring his theoretical links and differences not only with Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Balint and Milner, which are well documented, but also with Ferenczi, Lacan and importantly (as so frequently excluded) Jung and the London Jungians. Michael Fordham and Winnicott were colleagues through the British Psychological Society and both were preoccupied with early infant development. The authors draw out the differences and overlaps between the two men, and the subtle echoes in their work around development of the Self/True Self, the central value placed on a patient's experience within the analytic endeavour (and indeed, the anal