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This is a delightful book which explores important aspects of the life, theorizing and practice of D.W. Winnicott, and some of the uses to which his ideas have been and are being applied by psychoanalysts, artists, academicians and parent/infant researchers. I first encountered Winnicott's classic paper on ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’ (1953) in graduate school - not in psychology but in religion - in the mid-1980s. This seminal paper introduced the concept of the transitional object and crossed over from child development into thinking about the subject of illusion. Sigmund Freud, writing after the first world war, had given this subject a negative caste in his critique of religion, The Future of an Illusion . Writing after another world war, Winnicott rescued the concept of illusion and, applying it developmentally, concluded differently that illusion has a necessary place in the healthy emotional development of the child and the adult. Thus the two views of illusion both evolve from psychoanalytic thinking by two men who were deeply affected by the horrors of outbreaks of aggression that threatened and brought about vast destruction. The ways psychoanalysts, following Winnicott's thinking, have applied his unique understanding of the role of aggression is one of the themes that runs through this collection of papers. The papers collected in the first part of this book offer a perspective on the influential and creative work of Winnicott through exploring him in context just after the Second World War, among colleagues in the British Psychoanalytic Society, and through his career as a paediatrician and psychoanalyst. Part II, chapters 9 through 19, illustrates the evolving clinical application of several key themes from Winnicott's writings, which are, roughly: potential space, creating connections in consultation practice, being a transitional object with a psychotic patient, failure of the holding environment, the individual as isolate, hatre