ABSTRACT

This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part provides an account of Donald Winnicott, the person and his thinking, and an account of what the board discussed and what they subsequently decided Winnicott would have wanted his financial legacy to be used for. It draws on the author’s own interviews in the 1980s with a number of people who knew Winnicott. The part explores Winnicott's critique of Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections which asserts that Jung's failure to integrate his "primitive destructive impulses" was subsequent to his inadequate early containment, leaving him "handicapped by his own need to search for a self with which to know". It examines Donald Winnicott's 1949 paper "Hate in the counter-transference" which has an important place in the psychoanalytical literature, both as a feisty critique of mid-twentieth century biological psychiatry, and as a brave statement about the burdens of working psychotherapeutically with very ill patients.