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.

[2] Winnicott is best known for his ideas on the true self and false self, the "good enough" parent, and borrowed from his second wife, Clare, arguably his chief professional collaborator, the notion of the transitional object.

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.

[11] Having graduated from Cambridge with a third-class degree, he began studies in clinical medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London.

[10] 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.

[12] 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.

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.

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.

[21] 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.

"[22] Connected to the concept of holding is what Winnicott called the anti-social tendency, something which he argued "may be found in a normal individual, or in one that is neurotic or psychotic".

[24] He considered antisocial behaviour as a cry for help, fuelled by a sense of loss of integrity, when the familial holding environment was inadequate or ruptured.

[26] The capacity for being – the ability to feel genuinely alive inside, which Winnicott saw as essential to the maintenance of a true self – was fostered in his view by the practice of childhood play.

[27] In contrast to the emphasis in orthodox psychoanalysis upon generating insight into unconscious processes, Winnicott considered that playing was the key to emotional and psychological well-being.

It is likely that he first came upon this notion from his collaboration in wartime with the psychiatric social worker, Clare Britton, (later a psychoanalyst and his second wife) who in 1945 published an article on the importance of play for children.

[33] "Potential space" was Winnicott's term for a sense of an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others (again a concept that has been extrapolated to the practice of analysis).

[35] For Winnicott, one of the most important and precarious stages of development was in the first three years of life, when an infant grows into a child with an increasingly separate sense of self in relation to a larger world of other people.

[39] He meant that, while philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas about the self could be very complex and arcane, with a great deal of specialised jargon, there was a pragmatic usefulness to the ordinary word "self" with its range of traditional meanings.

[45] Winnicott thought that this more extreme kind of False Self began to develop in infancy, as a defence against an environment that felt unsafe or overwhelming because of a lack of reasonably attuned caregiving.

He thought that parents did not need to be perfectly attuned, but just "ordinarily devoted" or "good enough" to protect the baby from often experiencing overwhelming extremes of discomfort and distress, emotional or physical.

[46] One of the main defences Winnicott thought a baby could resort to was what he called "compliance", or behaviour motivated by a desire to please others rather than spontaneously express one's own feelings and ideas.

The division of the True and False self roughly develops from Freud's (1923) notion of the Superego which compels the Ego to modify and inhibit libidinal Id impulses, possibly leading to excessive repression but certainly altering the way the environment is perceived and responded to.

[16] Yet whereas from a Kleinian standpoint, his repudiation of the concepts of envy and the death drive were a resistant retreat from the harsh realities Klein had found in infant life, he has also been accused of being too close to her, of sharing in her regressive shift of focus away from the Oedipus complex to the pre-oedipal.

[58][59] Nevertheless, Winnicott remains one of the few twentieth-century analysts who, in stature, breadth, minuteness of observations, and theoretical fertility can legitimately be compared to Sigmund Freud.