ABSTRACT
This paper is Winnicott’s earliest major theoretical contribution to psychoanalysis. It contains the seeds of virtually all the major theoretical contributions that Winnicott would ultimately offer to the field during the next 26 years of his professional life. He discusses such wide-ranging topics as the patient’s fantasies about his inner organization; the depressed patient and that patient’s requiring an understanding of the therapist’s own depression; hate in psychotherapy; the vital role of the frame in containing both the patient and the therapist; the infant’s earliest sensory experiences; the earliest processes of infant development, including integration, personalization, and the realization of time and space; the infant’s experience of environmental failures as retaliatory attacks; the development of a reality orientation in the baby; and moments of illusion that undergird the development of creativity.
