ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by confessing that author have a mind far more inclined to unremembering and repression than would be his preference. But that inclination helps to explain why author remember only one speaker of the many who graced his analytic institute's Saturday morning guest speaker programme for its fledgling candidates. D. W. Winnicott had the ability to transport his listeners from the world of the familiar and the known to that of the unfamiliar and the unknown. This transforming experience is a prime example of a trait in Winnicott that leads author to describe him as a transitional thinker. The space into which Winnicott brings us is not only uncharted, it is inherently inventive, imaginative, and mind-expanding. Winnicott wrote of the holding environment, the way that the analyst safely holds the patient as a mother holds a child. Winnicott's work has helped to transform author from a non-writer to the author of some 125 papers and 34 books.
