ABSTRACT
D. W. Winnicott played a major role in helping children who had been relocated to areas of England during the Second World War when he became consultant psychiatrist to the Government Evacuation Scheme in Oxfordshire. Winnicott provides with many of the staples of our practice, for example, the holding environment, which allows the patient to feel his pain is bearable and has meaning. Winnicott advised, however, that holding can never be effective without understanding its converse, that is, impingement. Someone who has difficulty inhabiting his or her own skin will always chafe at what Winnicott called holding and what Wilfred Bion called containment. Winnicott says that psychotherapy is about two people playing together, and this was the closest we had come to play. Winnicott, in an interesting convergence, invoked St. Vincent's famous remark about the poor in his lecture to residential care staff.
