ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis in its first century has had several great thinkers, but, to my mind, only one great English-speaking writer: Donald Winnicott. Because style and content are so interdependent in his writing, his papers are not well served by a thematic reading aimed exclusively at gleaning what the paper is “about.” Such efforts often result in trivial aphorisms. Winnicott, for the most part, does not use language to arrive at conclusions; rather, he uses language to create experiences in reading which are inseparable from the ideas he is presenting – or, more accurately, the ideas he is playing with.
