ABSTRACT
Donald Winnicott writes about how his own ideas developed from the stresses of his work as a paediatrician and how, with the help of his personal analysis, he gradually came to see and understand "both the baby and the mother as human beings". Winnicott's profound knowledge of unconscious mental life was not immediately apparent to the students, who would also not necessarily link phantasy of this kind with feelings of hate. The widespread psychoanalytic use of the word "hate", as exemplified in Sigmund Freud and Winnicott, does not sit well with a non-analytic audience. Frequent digressions, ranging from child development to clinical analysis and to new theoretical ideas, produced problems of interpretation, both for the analyst, and especially for the non-analytic reader.
