The Facilitating Environment: Clinical Applications of Winnicott's Theory

A practicing pediatrician as well as analyst, Donald Woods Winnicott possessed a profound appreciation for the developmental tasks of life's earliest stages and, in particular, for the role of the other in successful maturation. While most practicing psychoanalysts are familiar with the concept of the transitional object-Winnicott's best known contribution-his work is sometimes considered more of interest to developmental theorists and child care workers than to psychotherapists. Yet his bibliography, which includes nearly 200 published works and many still unpublished papers, contains valuable discussions of a wide spectrum of clinical problems. Organized in four sections, The Facilitating Environment opens with a series of theoretical chapters that place Winnicott's key concepts in the framework of better-known schools of psychoanalytic thought. The clinical chapters that follow are divided into three parts, each corresponding to an important idea of Winnicott's: Transitional Phenomena, The False Self Organization, and The Psychotherapeutic Holding Environment. These chapters, which demonstrate the usefulness with which analysts of a variety of orientations have found his ideas, vary quite widely in their focus. The patients described range from a multiple personality to chronic schizophrenics, and they concern the treatment in both hospital and office settings of such problems as anorexia, delinquency, and chronic normalcy. This much-needed volume concludes with an engrossing chapter by Winnicott himself and titled 'Interpretation and Psychoanalysis' , this never before published paper offers a revealing look at issues of timing, technique and the place of the analyst.