D. W. Winnicott. Thinking About Children. Edited by Ray Shepherd, Jennifer Johns, and Helen Taylor Robinson.: New York:  Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1996. 343 pp.

This volume presents thirty-one of Donald Winnicott's lectures and essays dating from 1930 through 1970. Many are quite brief and sketchy; the thoughts they contain are often presented with an informality that can be simultaneously refreshing and disappointing. Twenty of the chapters have not been published previously; of the remainder, most appeared only in obscure journals (e.g., the St. Mary's Hospital Gazette). Thus, the editors of the present volume do us a service in adding this material to Winnicott's published bibliography. In addition, Harry Karnac does a special service in making available, as an appendix, his extensive alphabetical and chronological listings of Winnicott's many papers which now appear across twenty-one different volumes.

Those readers who have not read Winnicott before will likely find the present volume uneven in quality and more than a little frustrating. Most of the essays here were not written for publication, and one suspects that Winnicott himself would have wanted to rework them substantially before committing them to print. Those readers who