Product Description

D.W. Winnicott’s remarkable books, including The Piggle, Home Is Where We Start From and The Child, Family and the Outside World (all published by Penguin) are still read, valued and argued with over thirty years after his death. Adam Phillips's short book, now issued with a new preface, is an elegant, thoughtful attempt to get to grips with a writer, paediatrician and psychiatrist whose work with children and mothers (and the wider implications their relationship has for all of us) continues to be profoundly relevant and fascinating.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47138 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From the Inside Flap
Bestselling author of Going Sane

From the Back Cover
Writer, paediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott became internationally renowned for his work with mothers and children, and his books such as The Piggle and Home is Where We Start From. In this updated edition of Adam Phillips's acclaimed biography of Winnicott, now with a new preface, he gets to grips with a figure who made a huge contribution to our understanding of human development, and continues to be read, valued and argued over decades after his death.

Through an exploration of Winnicott's life and close readings of his most important papers, Adam Phillips traces his growing interest in the mother-infant relationship and the developmental process of children, and, above all, his radical, though often understated, revision of the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. In this sometimes critical, yet always penetrating and deeply considered, account of his life and work, Winnicott takes his place with Klein and Lacan as one of the very few great innovators within the psychoanalytic tradition.

About the Author
Adam Phillips is most recently the author of Going Sane and Side Effects. He is the general editor of the New Penguin Freud.

Customer Reviews

A unique introduction: informative & inspirational
Who better to write a book on who is arguably Britain's most important post-WW2 psychoanalytic writer, than Britian's most widely-read contemporary psychoanalytic writer? As any psychoanalytic psychotherapist will testify, contemporary therapy would be no where near what it is without Donald Winnicott. Adam Phillips (himself a practicing child and adult therapist) has said that, without having immersed himself in Winnicott's writings in particular, he could not have developed his own style and begun disseminating his own unique brand of psychoanalytic writing. This immersion is here more than evident. Phillips goes into comprehensive detail, displaying a thorough awareness of both the man and his ideas, yet never so abstractly that we lose track of the larger journey that is explicated through the various chapters of the book. Winnicott's major theoretical concepts are elaborated from first principles - the True/False Self dichotomy, Holding vs. Interpretation, etc. - interwoven with illuminating biographical information. Clearly deeply researched and intellectually considered, Phillips's Winnicott is just that: personal yet never polemic, distanced yet thought-provokingly involved. The book is rare - how many other biographies inspire one to go out and find others by the author *and* his subject? Although the reader new to psychoanalytic jargon might become unstuck in more than one or two places, these are moments worth suffering: for the trainee and the fascinated layperson alike, the book remains - quintessentially - unmissable.