ABSTRACT
The evacuation experience had a profound effect on D. W. Winnicott because he had to meet in a concentrated way the confusion brought about by the wholesale break-up of family life, and he had to experience the effect of separation and loss, and of destruction and death. According to F. Robert Rodman, Winnicott told Milner that “he was weaned early because his mother could not stand her own excitement during breast feeding”. When Winnicott uses the pronoun “we”, he is speaking as a member of the community of analysts, but he also belongs among those patients who cannot be reached by classical analysis because they exhibit “an essential lack of a true relation to external reality”. Clare Winnicott guesses that Elizabeth Winnicott “was forty-seven or something” when she died, whereas she was, in fact, sixty-three.
