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All this while you have been steadily doing psychoanalysis, not chopping from case to case, but 'bearing it out even to the edge of doom.'
WINNICOTT TO ROGER MONEY-KYRLE, FEB. 2, 1968
AS ANDRÉ GREEN HAS OBSERVED, "WINNICOTT'S ORIGINALITY OF thought and his originality as a person were inseparable" (Clancier and Kalmanovitch, 1984, p. 139); and, in this essay, I approach the connections between Freud and Winnicott in both biographical and intellectual terms. I begin by taking the contrast between the attitudes toward religion held by Freud and Winnicott as a point of departure for a selective, but I hope suggestive, comparison of their personal histories. I then turn to the domain of ideas and show how Winnicott's meditation on the mother-child bond leads not only to a recasting of psychoanalytic theory but also to an account of culture as a whole. A brief conclusion juxtaposes Winnicott's optimism and Freud's pessimism to draw together the biographical and the theoretical threads of this discussion.
Clare Winnicott told of one Sunday when Donald as a boy walked home with his father from church and asked him about religion. Frederick Winnicott replied: "Listen, my boy. You read the Bible—what you find there. And you decide for yourself what you want, you know. It's free. You don't have to believe what I think. Make up your own