interpretation was a sophisticated extension of infant care, albeit a crucial part of the analyst’s primary aim in the treatment which was to establish and maintain an environment conducive to growth. The defining characteristic of the analytic setting for Winnicott was not exclusively verbal exchange.

‘the theoretical position from which comes the spontaneous gesture and the personal idea. The spontaneous gesture is the True Self in action.’

‘Fantasy’, Winnicott writes, ‘is more primary than reality, and the enrichment of fantasy with the world’s riches depends on the experience of illusion.’56

In the Freudian scheme, culture signifies instinctual renunciation; for Winnicott it was the only medium for self-realization.

‘As a psychoanalyst,’ Winnicott wrote at this time, ‘I have had very good training in this matter of waiting and waiting and waiting.’

‘a most valuable compromise’ between the other two kinds, a compromise between language and silence.

From a psychoanalytic perspective the patient is always suffering from the self-knowledge he has had to refuse himself. Winnicott emphasizes in his first psychoanalytic papers that it is an ‘attitude… relatively free from anxiety’, not exclusively the interpretative process which can be a part of that attitude, that enables the child to become

through his use of an albeit idiosyncratic ordinary language, Winnicott made the theory of psychoanalysis more accessible to people it was originally intended to help.

secrecy, we should note, is different from silence; a secret can be found out, silence is, so to speak, invisible. They are both words Winnicott uses when writing about the True Self.