Main description:

Donald Winnicott, the first pediatrician to become a child psychoanalyst, was the most influential and important child therapist in the field of child clinical psychiatry and psychology. Having consulted with over 30,000 mothers and children as part of his work in London city hospitals over 40 years, he had an almost magical capacity to engage with children and to soothe and guide parents through their most anxiety-ridden times. His optimistic notions of the "good enough" mother has calmed generations of parents; his depiction of security blankets ("transitional objects") found full flower in the Charlie Brown character Linus; his stressing of the importance of the capacity to play as the gold standard of mental health had an enormous impact on preschool and kindergarten education and his focus on the insidious impact of a lack of authenticity or "false self" has led to countless papers on the malevolent impact of narcissism at both the individual and societal levels.

Attachment, Play and Authenticity: Winnicott in a Clinical Context, 2nd edition, attempts to take these contributions and place them directly in the consulting room. Actual child-therapist vignettes are paired with each chapter's theoretical contributions. The reader is thus first transported to Winnicott's powerfully alive depictions of what happens in healthy and pathological mother-child interaction and then brought to see how these depictions manifest themselves in child therapy. No other work on Winnicott has applied this focus to the integration of theory and practice.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Dialectical Meaning-Making in Infancy
Chapter 2: A Good Object must be Found in Order to be Created
Chapter 3: The True Self and False Compliance
Chapter 4: We are Essentially Isolates, with the Capacity to be Alone
Chapter 5: Using Objects and the Capacity to Hate
Chapter 6: Integrating Theory with Therapy: The Case of Bob
Chapter 7: The Meaning and Power of Play: How does learning to play enable work and indeed life to proceed?
Chapter 8: The Mind, the Body and the World of Transitional Phenomena
Chapter 9: Hate in the Countertransference
Chapter 10: The Antisocial Tendency
Chapter 11: The Aims of Psychoanalytic Treatment
Chapter 12: Winnicott as Therapist more than Theorist