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Margaret Boyle Spelman's Winnicott's Babies and Winnicott's Patients is a valuable piece of clinical scholarship. Her account of Winnicott's theories and practice is enlightening; she “holds” and “embraces” the reader through the work to provide a “living experience of being together” with part of Winnicott's system of thought. She provides a way to facilitate and synthesize our understanding of Winnicott's clinical style by beginning each chapter with an overview of its content and ending with a concise summary, and theory is offered in “small doses,” à la Winnicott, within the context of clinical problems. The book contains five chapters and a conclusion; it is valuable for any clinician or student of psychoanalysis interested in learning about Winnicott, although it does not go far enough to capture the richness of his theoretical spirit.
Winnicott changed the paradigm of psychoanalytic theory. Contrary to what one might take away from reading this book, he was not a developmental psychologist, nor is his theory about children per se. In a sense, Winnicott's babies are not really babies; he is talking about the entirety of human life, and his ultimate concerns revolve around the kind of life that is worth living: one that feels real and true. He begins with childhood experiences, but— in contrast to psychoanalytic tradition—doesn't take the child as constructed by the adult. For him, “there is no such a thing as a baby”; the child exists only in interaction with others in the environment.