In Honour of D.W. Winnicott on the 50th Anniversary of His Death

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the death of D.W. Winnicott. It seems with each passing year I find myself reading more of him, and benefiting in deeper ways from his many rich and often unusual insights. (I have an essay coming out this week that draws on him.) So I wanted to repost these reflections from last November so that we may continue to honour him in the best possible way: by reading him. 

Before you do that, you could do worse than to start here with this moving and fascinating reflection from his wife on how DWW understood death and wrote about the prospect of his own death. I have read it three times now and continue to learn different facets of him and of their marriage. His prayer "Oh God! May I be alive when I die" is one that repays careful reflection. (I will, in fact, have an essay about it coming out probably next month.) 

I recently noted an essay of D.W. Winnicott that I found very insightful. Now the BBC has published excerpts from various talks by, and about, Winnicott. It is a charming retrospective and will only take 10 minutes of your time. Have a listen here. 

I have not read all of Winnicott by any means, but my debts to him are noted in the above-linked piece and in other essays here (discussing his thrilling 1947 essay "Hate in the Counter-Transference") and here. 

For those who have the money and inclination, Oxford University Press recently published the entire opera omnia. 

For those who might find it useful, let me recommend a few individual books by and about him. There are many more, of course, but these are the ones I have read and in some cases re-read several times. 

For biographies, there are two I have read (and others I have not but hope to). The first is by Adam Phillips, titled simply Winnicott. It is one of Phillips' earliest publications, and is a relatively simple and straightforward book without some of the literary flourishes so common in his more recent books. 

The second is by Dodi Goldman, In Search of the Real: The Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott, published in 1989. It's somewhat more intellectually expansive than Phillips but generally complementary to his book. 

The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute had a library sale a year or two back, and I was very glad to get my hands on Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. That is a very rich collection despite the somewhat off-putting title. 

Next to this, his Playing and Reality is perhaps one of his most noteworthy books.

Winnicott's Home Is Where We Start From is somewhat mixed, but there are some good essays in there. 

Additionally, I'm only part-way through Psycho-Analytic Explorations, but it has many good essays in it, especially those on the uses of silence.

Though a bit dated now, Judith Hughes' Reshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain: The Work of Melanie Klein, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and D.W. Winnicott is useful for the wider context, and for showing the very important relationships between all three who, each in their own way and also together, form so much of the British object-relations tradition. I am always happy to see Fairbairn get some attention after his decades of more or less solitary Scottish labours in Edinburgh, far from the London scene where Winnicott and so many others made their name. Fairbairn's early essay on schizoid personalities remains one of the most illuminating things I have read on that score. 

Finally, I have started, but not yet finished, Stephen Parker's Winnicott and Religion. So far it's rather good, though not earth-shattering. Winnicott seems to have been comfortable, in that rather vague and pragmatic British way, being part of the Church of England though he was not especially demonstrative of it, least of all in his writings. 

On this score, one final book on my list to read: Ann Belford Ulanov Finding Space: Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality. I confess to never having heard of Ulanov (a New York-based Jungian analyst and academic) until almost exactly a year ago when I interviewed Pia Sophia Chaudhari about her recent and fascinating book, Dynamis of Healing:  You may read that interview here.