ABSTRACT
Winnicott's wish "to be alive when I die" was evidently granted, since much of his writing was first published posthumously. After Winnicott's death, Clare Winnicott set up a publications committee which, on her death in 1984, became the Winnicott Trust. Winnicott knew he was dependent on and sensitive to his thinking environment and have already seen how letter-writing provided a spur to expand his thinking. Additional thinking space was procured through regular correspondence in newspapers, learned journals, with fellow professionals and members of the public. In 1954, Winnicott claims that he is talking to himself in his letters and how important communication and the act of writing are to his thinking. For Winnicott the thinker, the early stages of independent thinking involve vestiges of this perfectly adaptive environment and grant the thinker undisturbed, unintegrated, omnipotent being in a relaxed state of identification with his thinking environment, where the paradox is tolerated that the thought is at once found and created.
