ABSTRACT
Having lived among paediatricians and psychiatrists, D. W. Winnicott experienced the inadequacy of thinking about health and illness in purely organicist terms at first hand. He seems to have realised at a very early stage that health, and even more importantly, the feeling of being alive, could not be reduced to the effective functioning of the body and its organs and that the separation of the physical from the psychic was intellectually possible, but highly artificial. In the paediatric practice, carried out in terms of child psychiatry, Winnicott succeded in verifying that most of the problems which brought mothers with their babies and children to a clinic were due to primitive emotional disorders. During the 1930s, as his psychoanalitical training progressed, Winnicott undertook to persuade paediatricians to abandon certain procedures resulting from a merely organicist background and to learn about psychological aspects in evaluating disorders in children.
