Donald Winnicott today

Donald Winnicott Today is a collection of essays edited by Winnicott scholar and psychoanalyst Jan Abram, whose many publications include The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott's Use of Words, an indispensable companion to Winnicott studies that was first published in 1996 and went into its second edition in 2007. This new book bears the title of a conference held in University College London in June 2006 and is another significant contribution to the secondary literature on Winnicott.

It falls into three main parts. The first part consists of introductory overviews of Winnicott's thinking and practice. The second offers a series of personal perspectives, which explore aspects and consequences of elements of that practice. Part 3 reviews the contributions that Winnicott made towards the end of his life. All are preceded by the author's Introduction (pp. 1–25) in which she guides the reader chapter-by-chapter by giving a concise and informative summary for each. Abram also supplies a helpful Winnicott chronology (pp. xxvi–xxx; first published in the Education Section of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2008, vol. 89, pp. 1189–1217), which brings into alignment his three phases of development as a theoretician: Phase 1 – The environment-individual set-up (1935–1944), Phase 2 – Transitional phenomena (1945–1960) and Phase 3 – The use of an object (1960–1971).

Each of the three parts of the volume opens with material by Winnicott himself: (1) ‘D.W.W. on D.W.W.’ (pp. 29–45), (2) ‘A personal view of the Kleinian contribution’ (pp. 159–167) and (3) ‘The use of an object in the context of Moses and Monotheism’ (pp. 293–301). These serve to orient the reader with an overview of his thinking and contribution to psychoanalysis: they also provide a background for the re-evaluation and expansion of his theoretical ideas in the other papers. Following an appendix outlining more recent directions in Winnicott studies, a glossary supplements Abram's chapter