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I had no way of knowing that publication of the letters of D. W. Winnicott was being planned when, in 1979, I wrote to Dr. Winnicott's widow, Mrs. Clare Winnicott, and asked whether I might edit them. I had just reread his response to a paper I had sent him in 1969. In its length and openness, his letter was more than a reply; it was a gift. It seemed likely that many other correspondents had been so favored. Winnicott's work, and, I suppose, Winnicott himself, had always seemed highly accessible to me, from my first reading of him as a medical student. And so the act of mailing him a paper without asking in advance whether he would mind was as typical of how I felt about him as was the letter I sent ten years later to Mrs. Winnicott, something out of the blue that might be acceptable anyway. It was.
I went to her home in Lower Belgrave Street in May of 1980 to meet with her and with Ray Shepherd, a psychoanalyst and a member of the Winnicott Publications Committee, and Peter Tizard, Winnicott's old friend and distinguished fellow pediatrician. After dinner, Mrs. Winnicott showed me to the comfortable basement room where the letters were kept. They had been organized in a series of ring binders from 1958 onward, one per year, with all the correspondence alphabetized. There were also several boxes full of unsorted letters and miscellaneous documents. I scanned this material and became convinced that a great deal of it would be of interest to a wide readership of psychoanalysts and others of diverse background.
The following year I arranged to have the material copied. But it was not until 1984 that I could continue the necessary work, and by then Mrs. Winnicott had succumbed to the illness that she had