Playing and Reality Revisited: A New Look at Winnicott's Classic Work, edited by Gennaro Saragnano and Christian Seulin,  Karnac Books, London, 2015,  256 pp.

One of the pleasures of growing older is the ability to have a long look backwards giving one the sense of wonder and appreciation for life's ironies. One such irony is how parochial my Michigan psychoanalytic training had been in the early 70s and how ecumenical it has become—with myself and several colleagues belonging to the Chinese American Psychoanalytic Association. But back then we studied Sigmund and Anna Freud, as well as Mahler's research on separation and individuations: five subjects studied in their sub-phase development passed for evidence-based material. Mahler and the then-consensus felt Winnicott's view of the good-enough mother was too simplistic since even in that small sample there were three interdependent variables—1. the mother's personality structure; 2. the developmental process of her parental function (Benedek, 1959); and 3 the mother's conscious, but particularly unconscious, fantasy regarding the individual child (p. 202). She concluded that the English school was wrong as was