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Once Donald Winnicott remarked to a group of his students: "What you get out of me, you will have to pick out of chaos." Winnicott's chaos, however, like Freud's id, is not truly an amorphous vacuum; nor is it, as Ovid termed chaos in Metamorphoses, an "undigestible lump." When opposed to the Cosmos, or ordered universe, Chaos can refer to that region between heaven and earth, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This is a definition that is not far from Winnicott's paradoxical, symbolic, playful space between reality and fantasy, an area that he worked within as well as conceptualized. I think that Winnicott's creative style allowed him to provide only a part of the organization of his ideas—the rest he asked for from his readers.
Any author who attempts to structure Winnicott's ideas accepts a significant challenge. The authors of Boundary and Space apologize for the book's being "not altogether tidy," stating that "one section will invade another, and repetitions occur." They explain: "With Winnicott it is particularly difficult to separate idea from idea, and impossible, as we have mentioned, to separate the ideas from the man" (p. xi). Those of us who have entered into a dialogue with the textual Winnicott cannot help but agree.
Boundary and Space attempts to present a rather text-near explication of Winnicott and, by doing so, to stimulate the reader to read Winnicott himself. Here the authors can be commended: they have accomplished their goal. Fortunately, they have been assisted greatly by Clare Winnicott, who provided them with access to much fascinating unpublished material, enriching quotes from which are sprinkled throughout the book.
Unfortunately, in their attempt to introduce and present Winnicott to the reader, the authors use Winnicott's own titles and metaphorical language for their organization. As a result, the book