Winnicott

Winnicott is concerned with the springs of imaginative living and of cultural experience in every sense, with whatever determines an individual's capacity to live creatively and to find life worth living.

Describes Winnicott's theories of child development, the mother-child relationship, and human sexuality.

In a work of startling originality, Professor Brett Kahr has resurrected Donald Winnicott from the dead and has invited him for a memorable cup of tea at 87 Chester Square – his former London residence – where the two men discuss Winnicott’s life and work in compelling detail. With original drawings by Alison Bechdel, best-selling author and illustrator of Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, this ‘posthumous interview’ will be the perfect guide for students and the ideal present for colleagues.

This delightful book presents a selection of D. W. Winnicott's best writing about children. The remarkable, enduring essays from Babies and Their Mothers and Talking to Parents are here combined with several hard-to-find gems of insight into the world of the child. Each piece was written for a wide audience of parents, childcare professionals, and teachers. In his empathic and witty way, Winnicott ranges over such timeless topics as the mother/infant relationship, trust, instilling a sense of security, negativism, jealousy and moral development. Now, in one volume, anyone who cares about children can enjoy the wisdom of a man many consider to be the most important psychoanalyst since Freud.A Merloyd Lawrence Book

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.

Donald Winnicott, the first pediatrician to become a child psychoanalyst, was the most influential and important child therapist in the field of child clinical psychiatry and psychology. Having consulted with over 30,000 mothers and children as part of his work in London city hospitals over 40 years, he had an almost magical capacity to engage with children and to soothe and guide parents through their most anxiety-ridden times. His optimistic notions of the “good enough” mother has calmed generations of parents; his depiction of security blankets (“transitional objects”) found full flower in the Charlie Brown character Linus; his stressing of the importance of the capacity to play as the gold standard of mental health had an enormous impact on preschool and kindergarten education and his focus on the insidious impact of a lack of authenticity or “false self” has led to countless papers on the malevolent impact of narcissism at both the individual and societal levels. Attachment, Play and Authenticity: Winnicott in a Clinical Context, 2nd edition, attempts to take these contributions and place them directly in the consulting room. Actual child-therapist vignettes are paired with each chapter's theoretical contributions. The reader is thus first transported to Winnicott's powerfully alive depictions of what happens in healthy and pathological mother-child interaction and then brought to see how these depictions manifest themselves in child therapy. No other work on Winnicott has applied this focus to the integration of theory and practice.

This book focuses on how Winnicott has enhanced our understanding of children, and how it has influenced the way in which we that work with them.