ABSTRACT
Implicit in the way Winnicott worked and wrote was the insistence that knowledge and knowers, thoughts and thinkers, cannot be separated. Every theory is the product of some theoretician, and that must never be forgotten. Winnicott never wrote an essay in which he was not explicitly as well as implicitly present in and through his text. Winnicott's contemporary, Fairbairn, was making a similar innovation, and so both can be regarded as forefathers of what Stephen Mitchell called "the paradigm shift in psychoanalysis" from drive theory to relational theory. The mother performs two sorts of functions for the infant, functions that Winnicott called "the object mother" and "the environmental mother". Transitional objects cushion the move from subjectivity to acknowledging the independence of the external world. They exist in the external world and are also given their meaning and special status by the child's imagination.
