Introduction

‘A whole flower to which every eye brings his contribution’1

It is to the areas that linked Winnicott and Gaddini that we must look to find the bases for the personal friendship and sense of professional kinship that are reflected in the contents of this issue, devoted chiefly to their correspondence over the last ten years of Winnicott's life.

We find their mutual and lifelong preoccupation with the indivisibility of psyche and soma as a basis for health. We see their mutual formulation of infant development in terms of its emotional foundation. We may note their shared sense of isolation as paediatricians working in a field that remains vigorously inimical to the concept of health to which psychoanalysis has so much to contribute.

It is clear why Gaddini regarded Winnicott as her ‘mentor’ (Gaddini 2000, p. 32). They both worked from a huge empirical base. They regarded each child, if constitutionally unique, as having an individuality that had to be considered in terms of his or her complex early interrelating internal and external environments. It was this fundamental premise that would make it possible to understand what it meant to be a person from the beginning of life. They both sought a philosophical understanding of what health was about and what might enable a child to move from absolute dependence towards independence, through the presence of a facilitating environment.

The theoretical link that was to forge a powerful, ongoing and personal collaboration between them was, of course, Winnicott's conceptualization of transitional objects and transitional phenomena. Winnicott's original paper (Winnicott 1951) was written almost at the juncture of Gaddini's recognition of Winnicott's solitary development as paediatrician, child psychiatrist, child analyst and psychoanalyst, all areas in which Gaddini was to become an eminent practitioner throughout her life.

Gaddini was eventually to be the sole psychoanalyst nominated as a