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This book, the last published before Winnicott's death, allows us to see the workings of a great mind. It is honest and warm, revealing the qualities that so endeared Winnicott to his pupils, his colleagues, and his patients.
His 1953 paper, Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena, is reprinted as the first chapter. Succeeding chapters focus on transitional phenomena and their applications to object relations theory, to the purpose and meaning of children's play, to creativity, to cultural and religious life, and to psychotherapeutic experience.
Winnicott describes an 'intermediate' area of human experience, neither inside the individual nor outside in shared reality, which is part of the continuum of the child's experience as he proceeds from the original state of oneness with his mother to the eventual achievement of separate and independent functioning. It is a 'third area' which is never completely given up, even by the mature adult; it includes the babbling of the infant and later his songs, stories, and play, and continues into creative thinking in adults as well as into religious life, philosophical thinking, and cultural heritage.
Careful study of this book will elucidate such illuminating concepts as the 'acceptance of the paradox: the baby creates the object, but the object was there waiting to be created and to become a cathected object' (p. 89); the mirror role of the mother and family in child development; how male and female elements apply to object-relationships and to personality formation; and the relationship