the doctor’s unanxious recognition of the child’s predicament, what Winnicott calls elsewhere ‘appreciative understanding’, is itself an intervention. The doctor is ‘meeting need with appropriate action, or studied inaction’.34

Winnicott distinguished – and it is a distinction alive in every area of his work – between ‘people who are attracted to the task of applying a set scheme’ and ‘those who are attracted by the task of developing a scheme themselves’.7 There are those people, Winnicott implies, who recreate what they find out of their own desire, and those who comply

Perry Meisel has written that in England, unlike the rest of Europe, ‘psychoanalysis lingered longer in a state of generous dilettantism; as nonmedical practitioners, James and Alix (his wife) were rather unusual because they made it the principal focus of their lives. Anthropologists, art historians, economists, as well as doctors of various

The mother does not give the infant a feed, the infant gives the mother the opportunity to feed him. The clues provided by the patient facilitate the analyst’s capacity to interpret.

the fascist state is a false solution for the individual to the ‘fear of chaos and uncontrol’ that the earliest instinctual life brings with it. This fear generates either ‘the compulsion to attain power’ or the need to be controlled. ‘Both inhibition and licence’, Winnicott writes, ‘are easy, and both may be cheaply bought by giving over

the value of treating emotional problems by non-interference, by the provision of a holding environment in which ‘natural’ growth processes could reassert themselves. ‘If we can adjust ourselves to these natural processes,’ he writes, ‘we can leave most of these complex mechanisms to nature, while we sit back and watch and learn.”

the paradox of these childhood solutions was that they enabled the child to survive, but with the unconscious project and hope of finding an environment in which development could start up again. A life could be lived, that is to say, in suspended animation.

The obstacles, for both analyst and patient, were revealed to be the instruments. As a medical doctor who became a psychoanalyst, Winnicott was always to experience a divided duty. ‘I absolutely believe’, he wrote, ‘in objectivity and in looking at things straight and doing things about them; but not in making it boring by forgetting the fantasy,

Psycho-pathology, in his view, referred to the ways in which the infant or child complied with demands from the environment that were extrinsic to his real development; and one of the functions of this compliance was to protect a possibility for future growth in a more nurturing environment.