ABSTRACT
Donald Winnicott directed towards the importance of play in the emotional life of the developing child. Winnicott has had an extensive influence on many clinicians working with infants and young children. S. Lebovici, who demonstrated an amazing synthesis of psychoanalytic understanding, family work, and a powerful sense of dramatic engagement with children, acknowledges the influence of Winnicott on his thinking. Dr Ann Morgan, influenced directly by Winnicott, is an infant-parent psychotherapist and paediatrician in Melbourne and has been a persistent and vigorous proponent of clinicians being with the baby as a person in his own right, deserving of direct therapeutic engagement. Winnicott developed the idea of transitional space, and with that he expanded what understand of the process of playing. Paraphrasing Winnicott's classic paper, playing involves preoccupation and concentration. Winnicott saw a direct development out of the transitional phenomena to shared playing, and he famously discussed the cultural experience.
