Reading Winnicott
Key Winnicott papers with commentary introducing his clinical thought.
This selection aims to make Winnicott's key ideas available with some awareness of chronological development and also with the realization that an author's concerns may be there in potential from the start.
Reading Winnicott collects fourteen of Winnicott's papers and pairs each with an editorial introduction from Caldwell and Joyce. The papers are grouped into four areas: the relational environment and infantile sexuality; aggression and destructiveness; illusion and transitional phenomena; and the theory and practice of analysis with adults and children. The editors set each paper in the sequence of Winnicott's thinking, tracing how ideas recur and shift across three decades rather than as fixed positions.
For the clinician, the value lies in reading the primary texts alongside commentary that locates them in practice. The introductions connect concepts such as holding, the good-enough mother, the transitional object, and the use of an object to the questions they were written to address, marking where Winnicott's technique departs from classical method. Caldwell and Joyce attend to the difficulties in his prose, noting where a term carries more than one meaning. It works as a guided reading of the papers, keeping his account of dependence and the maternal environment close to the consulting room.
About the authors
Lesley Caldwell
Lesley Caldwell is a British psychoanalyst and academic, an Honorary Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. She is a psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytic Association and a member of the British Psychoanalytic Foundation. With Helen Taylor Robinson she serves as joint general editor of the Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott (Oxford University Press, 2016). She co-edited Reading Winnicott with Angela Joyce, and she has written on psychoanalysis, film, and Italian cinema.
Angela Joyce
Angela Joyce is a British psychoanalyst and child specialist. She is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and she trained as a child analyst at the Anna Freud Centre, where she was a member of the pioneering Parent Infant Project and jointly led the child psychotherapy service. She chairs the Winnicott Trust and, with Lesley Caldwell, co-edited Reading Winnicott. Her work centres on Winnicott scholarship, infant mental health, and psychoanalytic work with parents and infants.
Details
- 2011
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 336
- 9780415415958