ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what Donald Winnicott thought of as 'health'. It explores what his vision of health and coming into being mean, how he suggests development can be facilitated to provide maximum opportunities for a 'healthy' life and what, in turn, accepting such a vision could mean for those helping people to learn. Current concerns about healthy living and healthy lifestyles focus on what Winnicott might have thought of as the soma, the body: the physical body's fitness, mobility, nutrition and exercise. The chapter focuses on the developmental story that Winnicott the paediatrician describes, but one can imagine the new-born baby's initial sense of fragmentation, of emerging from the womb to a new environment ill equipped to survive and utterly dependent on others. He identifies some of the difficulties that can arise in childhood and especially in adolescence, most notably stealing and destructive behaviours.
