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This volume contains twenty-one vignettes of brief encounters between Winnicott, his child patients, and at times their parents. It reflects the author's ease with children as well as his confident expectation that he could count on parents to help in the psychotherapeutic endeavor. Winnicott's empathy, intuition, and thorough knowledge of children come through on every page.
The book, a delight to read, is deceptively simple. Winnicott himself was aware of the dangers of this simplicity and repeats throughout that the basis of his work lies in his knowledge of child development, in his analytic training, including his personal analysis, and in the many years he practiced orthodox child analysis.
He demonstrates the use of his 'squiggle game', a technique which he used with great ease and which encouraged his child patients to become involved with him. But he cautions those who might be tempted to emulate him by using the 'squiggle game': the 'squiggle' drawings were only a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The games were part of the communicative medium of Winnicott.