ABSTRACT
Children can sense very quickly what a doctor is seeking to find in a meeting. It is part of the nature of a consultation that the consultant is seen as the "stage master", and patients will adapt to his directives with only occasional awareness of the implications and consequences created by that adaptation. Donald Winnicott thought and conceptualized his findings within a psychoanalytic framework, but he followed the doctor's basic duty vis-a-vis his patients: they came for help, and his goal was to do his best to relieve their suffering. Mothers play a very important role in Winnicott's conceptualizations of child development; he will often speak of "parents" in his formulations, but, in fact, fathers do not appear much in descriptions of his clinical work. Perhaps the two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, in that one might be described as the conceptualization of one's findings and the other the actual clinical, explicit interpretation that is given to the patient.
