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Lesley Caldwell and Angela Joyce, London, Routledge and NLPA, 2011, 308 pp., £19.76 (paperback)
Lewis A. Kirsner, London, Routledge, 2011, 174 pp., £17.09 (paperback)
I wish that both of these books had been published some years ago when I was introducing psychotherapy trainees and psychoanalytic studies students to Winnicott's contributions to psychoanalysis. Reading Winnicott is much more than a collection of 14 key papers by Winnicott with introductions by the editors, although that alone would have been helpful. Lesley Caldwell and Angela Joyce contextualize Winnicott's evolving ideas before each selected paper with reference to contemporaneous and more recent debates, bringing out illuminating connections and resonances related to a wide variety of thinkers. For example, they identify a link between Michael Fordham's Jungian ideas about the self and solitude and Winnicott's thoughts about the necessity for isolation at a deep part of the self where experience is felt. Winnicott, however insisted it must not be an insulated kind of isolation. Numerous other connections are made, some of which are not new, like the way in which mirroring was taken up by both Lacan and Winnicott (also featured in Kirsner's book) and, throughout the text, Winnicott's debt to and departure from Kleinian ideas are clarified. The editors' selection thus enriches our general grasp of theory and in particular practice, be it related to psychotherapy, psychoanalysis or social work. This is a lucid, scholarly addition to the growing literature on Winnicott's unique perspective on psychoanalysis and on the development of a human person.
Winnicott's papers themselves are both a pleasure to read and frustrating at times. He is not a didactic writer and his thoughts are profoundly rooted in clinical practice as well as his own experiencing self. He liked to use paradox and to write in such a way that explanation is partnered with a kind of poetic evocation. Indeed, he writes rather as he played