Reading Winnicott brings together a selection of papers by the psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, providing an insight into his work and charting its impact on the well-being of mothers, babies, children and families.

With individual introductions summarising the key features of each of Winnicott’s papers this book not only offers an overview of Winnicott’s work, but also links it with Freud and later theorists. Areas of discussion include:

the relational environment and the place of infantile sexuality aggression and destructiveness illusion and transitional phenomena theory and practice of psychoanalysis of adults and children.

As such Reading Winnicott will be essential reading for all students wanting to learn more about Winnicott’s theories and their impact on psychoanalysis and the wider field of mental health.

Reviews

"Re-investing in Winnicott through the scholarship and clinical acumen of two present day psychoanalysts and reading him through the data and the interpretation their text affords, offers the reader the benefit of a serious and impressive contribution, not, in my view, attempted so wide-rangingly or so comprehensively before." - Helen Taylor Robinson, From the Preface.

"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." - Geraldine Shipton, University of Sheffield , UK

Contents

The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation (1941). Primitive Emotional Development (1945). Hate in the Countertransference (1947). Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma (1949). Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena (1951; 1971). Metapsychological and Clinical Aspects of Regression Within the Psychoanalytical Set-up (1954). The Theory of the Parent-infant Relationship (1960). The Development of the Capacity for Concern (1963). Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certaines (1963). Fear of Breakdown (1963). A Clinical Study of the Effect of a Failure of the Average: Expectable Environment on a Child’s Mental Functioning (1965). Playing: A Theoretical Statement (1968). The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications (1968). Creativity and its Origins (1971).

Author Bio

Lesley Caldwell is a psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytic Association. She has also worked as an academic, currently at UCL, for more than thirty years.She is the Chair of the Winnicott Trust and one of its editors.

Angela Joyce is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She trained as a child analyst at the Anna Freud Centre where she has helped to pioneer psychoanalytic work with infants and parents, and is currently jointly leading the resurgence of child psychotherapy there. She also is an editor with the Winnicott Trust.