ABSTRACT
Donald Woods Winnicott's clinical work with infants and children in the pre-oedipal phase of development, and his observations on the dynamic relationship between mother and child have proven to be an important source of information for the elucidation of the origins of those ineluctable conditions, the sexual perversions. In this chapter, the author describes several areas in which the author have applied some of Donald Woods Winnicott's concepts to material derived from the analysis and reconstruction of the early life of perverse patients, namely the false-self integration found in the perverse patient, the non-facilitating environment in which the patient was raised, and the infantile genetic matrix of the patient's depressive affect and its importance in perverse development. Winnicott deserves a special position among those who have studied the depressive affect and its importance for child development, and its role in later psychopathology.
