Donald Woods Winnicott (7 April 1896 – 25 January 1971) was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory and developmental psychology. He was a leading member of the British Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society, President of the British Psychoanalytical Society twice (1956–1959 and 1965–1968), and a close associate of British writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner.
Winnicott is best known for his ideas on the true self and false self, the "good enough" parent, and he and his second wife, Clare, arguably his chief professional collaborator, worked with the notion of the transitional object. He wrote several books, including Playing and Reality, and more than 200 papers.
Winnicott was born on 7 April 1896 in Plymouth, Devon, England, to Sir John Frederick Winnicott and Elizabeth Martha, daughter of chemist and druggist William Woods, of Plymouth. Sir John Winnicott was a partner in the family firm, in business as hardware merchants and manufacturers, and was knighted in 1924, having served twice as mayor of Plymouth; he was also a magistrate and alderman. The Winnicott family were staunch, civic-minded Methodists.
The family was prosperous and ostensibly happy, but behind the veneer, Winnicott saw himself as oppressed by his mother, who tended toward depression, as well as by his two sisters and his nanny. He would eventually speak of 'his own early childhood experience of trying to make "my living" by keeping his mother alive'. His father's influence was that of an enterprising freethinker who encouraged his son's creativity. Winnicott described himself as a disturbed adolescent, reacting against his own self-restraining "goodness" acquired from trying to assuage the dark moods of his mother.
He first thought of studying medicine while at The Leys School, a boarding school in Cambridge, after fracturing his clavicle and recording in his diary that he wished he could treat himself. He began pre-clinical studies in biology, physiology and anatomy at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1914 but, with the onset of World War I, his studies were interrupted when he was made a medical trainee at the temporary hospital in Cambridge. In 1917, he joined the Royal Navy as a medical officer on the destroyer HMS Lucifer.
Having graduated from Cambridge with a third-class degree, he began studies in clinical medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London. During this time, he learned from his mentor the art of listening carefully when taking medical histories from patients, a skill that he would later identify as foundational to his practice as a psychoanalyst.
Winnicott completed his medical studies in 1920, and in 1923, the same year as his marriage to the artist Alice Buxton Winnicott (born Taylor). She was a potter and they married on 7 July 1923 in St Mary's Church, Frensham. Alice had "severe psychological difficulties" and Winnicott arranged for her and his own therapy to address the difficulties this condition created. He obtained a post as physician at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London, where he was to work as a paediatrician and child psychoanalyst for 40 years. In 1923 he began a ten-year psychoanalysis with James Strachey, and in 1927 he began training as an analytic candidate. Strachey discussed Winnicott's case with his wife Alix Strachey, apparently reporting that Winnicott's sex life was affected by his anxieties. Winnicott's second analysis, beginning in 1936, was with Joan Riviere.
Winnicott rose to prominence as a psychoanalyst just as the followers of Anna Freud were in conflict with those of Melanie Klein for the right to be called Sigmund Freud's "true intellectual heirs". Out of the Controversial discussions during World War II, a compromise was reached with three more-or-less amicable groups within the psychoanalytic movement: the Anna Freudians, the Kleinians, and the Middle (or later Independent) Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society, to which Winnicott belonged, along with Ronald Fairbairn, Michael Balint, Masud Khan, John Bowlby, Marion Milner, and Margaret Little.
During the Second World War, Winnicott served as consultant paediatrician to the children's evacuation programme. During the war, he met and worked with Clare Britton, a psychiatric social worker who became his colleague in treating children displaced from their homes by wartime evacuation. Winnicott was lecturing after the war and Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie of the BBC asked him to give over sixty talks on the radio between 1943 and 1966. His first series of talks in 1943 was titled "Happy Children". As a result of the success of these talks, Quigley offered him total control over the content of his talks but this soon became more consultative as Quigley advised him on the correct pitch.
After the war, Winnicott also saw patients in his private practice. Among contemporaries influenced by him was R. D. Laing, who wrote to Winnicott in 1958 acknowledging his help.
Winnicott divorced his first wife in 1949 and married Clare Britton (1906–1984) in 1951. A keen observer of children as a social worker and a psychoanalyst in her own right, she had an important influence on the development of his theories and likely acted as midwife to his prolific publications after they met.
Except for one book published in 1931 (Clinical Notes on Disorders of Childhood), all of Winnicott's books were published after 1944, including The Ordinary Devoted Mother and Her Baby (1949), The Child and the Family (1957), Playing and Reality (1971), and Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis (1986).
Winnicott died on 25 January 1971, following the last of a series of heart attacks and was cremated in London. Clare Winnicott oversaw the posthumous publication of several of his works.
Winnicott's paediatric work with children and their mothers led to the development of his influential concept concerning the "holding environment". Winnicott claimed that "the foundations of health are laid down by the ordinary mother in her ordinary loving care of her own baby", central to which was the mother's attentive holding of her child.
Winnicott considered that the "mother's technique of holding, of bathing, of feeding, everything she did for the baby, added up to the child's first idea of the mother", as well as fostering the ability to experience the body as the place wherein one securely lives. Extrapolating the concept of holding from mother to family and the outside world, Winnicott saw as key to healthy development "the continuation of reliable holding in terms of the ever-widening circle of family and school and social life".
Winnicott was influential in viewing the work of the psychotherapist as offering a substitute holding environment based on the mother/infant bond. Winnicott wrote: "A correct and well-timed interpretation in an analytic treatment gives a sense of being held physically that is more real...than if a real holding or nursing had taken place. Understanding goes deeper".
His theoretical writings emphasised empathy, imagination, and, in the words of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has been a proponent of his work, "the highly particular transactions that constitute love between two imperfect people."
Transitional phenomena and transitional objects