ABSTRACT

Donald Woods Winnicott was a paediatrician and psychoanalyst, whose writings are made up of theoretical papers, reviews, journal articles, and letters. Winnicott qualified as an adult psychoanalyst in 1934 and in the following year as the first male child psychoanalyst with the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Consequently, his major contributions to the development of psychoanalytic theory have been shaped by his involvement with families and their children in his role as paediatrician, in tandem with his clinical work as a psychoanalyst. Winnicott’s first significant psychoanalytic paper was “The Manic Defence”, which he presented to a scientific meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1935. Winnicott’s work on true and false self is an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory not only in its own right, clinically, it alerts the analyst to the varying shades of true and false experience within the transference–countertransference matrix. The entries contain selected quotations from Winnicott’s papers, spanning almost forty years, to track the evolution of his theories.