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Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in unused condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Donald Winnicott has a reputation here and there of being difficult to understand. There is no doubt that his theory of development is complex and there is also no doubt that some of the things he says are blindingly simple. In a recent textbook of child psychiatry we find the opinion that Winnicott’s exposition of developmental theory is characterized by a “poetic evocation of child development and maternal experience in an individual language difficult to link with other approaches” (135). This perhaps touches the heart of the mat- ter and there are two reasons why it may be so. The first is that Winnicott took the theory of emotional development back into ear- liest infancy even before birth and much of this work was therefore devoted to the verbal exploration of what is preverbal in the history of the individual. The invention of a purely technical vocabulary would have been useless here because it would have had no mean- ing so he needed to borrow the “poetic” to help him with work that he himself certainly considered scientific. The second and allied reason is that he felt in any case that “a writer on human nature needs to be constantly drawn to simple English and away from the jargon of the psychologist” (87). Believing it impossible to talk about human nature without the intrusion of his own life expe- rience and that of his reader (or audience or student or patient) he actively sought through his style of writing and talking to enlist these experiences in bringing about an understanding of what he had to say So the reader is invited to respond not with the intellect alone but with the whole self including all that is remembered and all that is forgotten. Wherever this response can be made it is likely that something of what Winnicott is saying will already be familiar and the rest on the basis of this familiarity will begin to fall into place. (LL)