Winnicott - The Family and Individual Development

Winnicott develops his themes where others would get stuck in explicatory verbalisings Psychiatrists and social scientists, sitting half-way between the priest and engineer, enjoy a hot spot in our democracy. It takes a man with Winnicotts creative flair to assure us that some can preserve their integrity while sitting there.

New Society

These essays are packed with the authors very personal wisdom, humanity and charm, and will illuminate the understanding of any adult who reads them. If one had half a dozen copies to whom would one give them? To a sister in charge of a childrens ward, a health visitor, a married couple embarking on a family, a childrens officer, a mid-wife perhaps and certainly to a paediatrician.

Archives of Disease in Childhood

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D. W.
Winnicott

With a new introduction by Martha Nussbaum

First published 1965 by Tavistock Publications Limited

Reprinted 1989 by Routledge

Reprinted 2001 by Brunner-Routledge

First published in Routledge Classics 2006

by Routledge

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1965 D. W. Winnicott

2006 Introduction to the Routledge Classics edition, Martha Nussbaum

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by

The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Winnicott, D. W. (Donald Woods), 18961971.

The family and individual development / D. W. Winnicott ; with a new introduction by Martha Nussbaum.

p. ; cm.

Originally published: London : Tavistock, 1965.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN13: 9780415402774

ISBN10: 0415402778

1. Developmental psychiatry. 2. FamilyPsychological aspects. 3. Psychology, Pathological. I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. Child Psychology. 2. Family. 3. Human Development.

4. ParentChild Relations. WS 105 W779f 1965a]

RC454.4.W56 2006

155.4dc22 2006017331

ISBN10: 0415-402778

ISBN13: 9780415402774

Here I have gathered together papers given during the past decade, mostly to groups of social workers. The central topic of the book is the family, and the development of social groups out of this first natural group. I have included various attempts to state and restate the theory of the emotional growth of the individual human child, and my justification for this is that the structure of the family arises to a large extent out of the tendencies towards organization in the individual personality.

The family has a clearly defined position at the place where the developing child meets the forces that operate in society. The prototype of this interaction is to be found in the original infant-mother relationship in which, in an extremely complex way, the world represented by the mother is helping or hindering the inherited tendency of the infant to grow. It is this idea that is developed in the course of this collection of papers, although each was designed to meet what seemed to be the needs of the groups concerned at a specific time and place.

I wish once more to thank my secretary, Mrs Joyce Coles, for her patient and accurate work.

To Mr M. Masud Khan I am grateful for his advice and for his work on the index.

Acknowledgement of debt is also due to the following editors, publishers, and organizations for permission to publish material that has already appeared in print: the Editor of the New Era in Home and School; the Editor of the Nursing Times; the Editor of New Society; the Editor of the British Journal of Psychiatric Social Work; the Editor of the Medical Press; the Editor of Human Relations; the Editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal; Butterworth & Co. (Publishers) Ltd; the British Broadcasting Corporation.

A list of original sources is given below.

D. W. WINNICOTT, F.R.C.P.

1 Published in the Medical Press, March 1958.

2 Lecture given to the Association of Workers for Maladjusted Children, April 1960 (Rewritten 1964).

4 BBC broadcast, March 1960.

5 BBC broadcast, June 1962.

6 Lecture given at Goldsmiths College, October 1957; to the Association of Child Care Officers, May 1958; and at McGill University, October 1960; subsequently published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 1961.

7 Lecture given at the Family Service Units Caseworkers Study Weekend, October 1958.

8 Lecture to the Association of Child Care Officers, February 1960.

9 Lecture to the Association of Psychiatric Social Workers, November 1959; subsequently published in the British Journal of Psychiatric Social Work, vol. 6, no. 1, 1961.

10 Based on a lecture given to the Senior Staff of the London County Council Childrens Department, February 1961; subsequently published in New Era in Home and School, October 1962; and in an altered form, entitled Struggling through the Doldrums, in New Society, 25 April 1963.

11 Lecture to the Society for Psychosomatic Research, November 1960.

12 Part of in Modern Trends in Paediatrics (Second Series), edited by A. Holzel & J. P. M. Tizard (London: Butterworth, 1958).

13 Lecture given at a course organized by the Association of Supervisors of Midwives; subsequently published in the Nursing Times, 17 and 24 May 1957.

14 Lecture given at a course for midwives organized by the Royal College of Midwives, November 1957.

15 Lecture to the Association of London County Council Child Welfare Officers, October 1959.

16 Lecture to the Nursery School Association, July 1950.

17 Lecture to the Association of Workers for Maladjusted Children, April 1955.

18 Published in Human Relations, vol. 3, no. 2, June 1950.

To Clare

Unlike Freud, Donald Winnicott is not a cultural icon, read in Great Books courses, revered and reviled. Unlike Jacques Lacan, he is not an intellectual cult figure, with a band of zealous disciples and an impenetrable jargon. This is as he wished it. Nobody was more skeptical of cults and the rigidity they induced. All his life he was obsessed with the freedom of the individual self to exist defiantly, resisting parental and cultural demands. His writings express this commitment, speaking in a voice that is personal, idiosyncratic, playful and, at the same time, ordinary. That, perhaps, is why he has had a larger influence on practitioners than on theoreticians, so awkward, often, with real people and the demands their complexity imposes.