ABSTRACT
Donald Winnicott developed his contribution to the psychoanalytic dialogue in the intellectual and social climate of the British Psychoanalytical Society of the 1920’s through the early 70’s. The British Society during much of this period was sharply and often bitterly divided between the ideas and personalities of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Winnicott was analyzed first by James Strachey and then by Joan Rivière, one of the early Kleinian ‘inner circle’; he was supervised by Melanie Klein in his psychoanalytic work with children. Although Winnicott’s thinking developed in a direction different from that of Klein, he never denounced Kleinian thinking as did many analysts who had been at one point open to Klein’s ideas (e.g. Glover [1945] and Schmideberg [1935]).
