Along with "Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment" and "Playing and Reality," this volume contains the core of Winnicott's celebrated work. Dense and hard to decipher prose is mixed with scintillatingly clear insight and profound insight. A true intellectual adventure, one of the great champions of the conceptualization of human creativity. One of my favorite books. ( )

During four decades of seeing nearly 60,000 infants, children, mothers, fathers, parents and grandparents while at Paddington Green Children's Hospital and the Queen's Hospital for Children [M. Khan in the introduction to D. W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis: Collected Papers (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1975; Original work published 1958)], Winnicott developed "the unusual ability to imagine himself in the mother's place. He has deep empathy for what a mother experiences or feels, and can give voice to those feelings in a way that is helpful, understandable, and very reassuring. He does this in a manner that respects, appreciates, and allows for errors, for moments of progress and regression, and for the humanness of all parents" [Klaus in the foreword to D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World [Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987; Original work published 1964), 4-5]. This is a collection of papers that attempts to condense this experience into concepts and words.