ABSTRACT
Winnicott was twenty-three and already a medical doctor when he first became interested in psychoanalysis after reading Freud's TheInterpretation of Dreams. His first analyst, James Strachey and his second, Joan Riviere, were both analysed by Freud and were considered to be, for the most part, Kleinians. This chapter presents an overview of Winnicott's thinking about human development which does not include his important extrapolations to the clinical situation. Winnicott proposed that the individual preordained maturational process naturally unfolds in the facilitating environment. He saw the workings of the facilitating environment in his paediatric work; the complete and sensitive adaptation of a "good enough" or "ordinary devoted" mother to her infant's need at the beginning of his life. For him, the prototype environment is the mother's care experienced over time, and much of his genius is in the fact that he accounts separately and equally well for the very different perspectives of the immature infant and his mature mother.
