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That Donald W. Winnicott has made important contributions to the field of psychoanalysis is undeniable. This has not always been so, however. Winnicott's views were not always well received. Controversy swirled around him at times. An intermittent, bitter rivalry took place between him and Melanie Klein, with dispute as to which of them had a right to claim originality of certain ideas. Traditional Freudian psychoanalysts did not always welcome Winnicott's observations on certain aspects of preoedipal development, which seemed to some to challenge Freud's emphasis upon the centrality of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalytic theory. He never found himself comfortably in the mainstream of the psychoanalytic community, which made him unhappy to a significant extent, despite personal ambition, inner certainty that his observations were valuable, and a dogged insistence upon presenting his views to his not always receptive professional colleagues.
How welcome it had to be to Winnicott to come to know Renata Gaddini,2 both professionally and personally, as a kindred spirit who had much in common with him and who fully and unabashedly appreciated and admired his seminal contributions. As Nina Farhi puts it in her introduction to this publication of the Gaddini-Winnicott correspondence, the two of them had a