ABSTRACT
Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion were contemporaries, born a year and a half apart. Both saw war service at the end of the First World War. With very different origins, and intentions towards psychoanalysis, they appear to have become a couple of outsized personalities trying to live in much the same space—the space they each created being to develop Kleinian ideas. Bion and Winnicott are often coupled together as the originators of the terms "holding" and "containing". From 1945, in his early position paper on emotional development of the infant, Winnicott stated categorically, "at the theoretical start the personality is unintegrated". Winnicott's eclipse, and removal from the Kleinian tradition, does not negate the fact that at one time Winnicott did see himself as making his own contributions to that tradition, in his own way. That was prior to the disagreements over the paranoid-schizoid position and over the unintegrated ego at birth.
