ABSTRACT
Winnicott was born in 1896 in Plymouth, Devon, where his father Frederick, a successful local businessman, eventually became mayor. There was a yawning cultural gap separating Winnicott from Freud (and also, although somewhat less so, from Klein and Reich). Winnicott came from a background of social and economic security. His family were part of what Freud called the "compact majority", who never had to face or perhaps even think about racial discrimination. Winnicott's attitude towards anti-social behaviour typified his concern with the real relationship between a real child and its real environment. Issues pertaining to the inner world (Klein) or self-and object-representations (Freud) were important for him but were subordinate to the issue of adaptation to reality. Winnicott developed his ideas about the role of environmental provision in two distinct yet interrelated directions: in relation to child development and in relation to psychoanalytic technique.
