The Spontaneous Gesture : Selected Letters of D.W. Winnicott

This volume consists of the collected letters of D. W. Winnicott, a central figure in British psychoanalysis in the generation following Freud. Suspicious of dogma and deeply committed to the value of his own observations, he maintained a highly personal therapeutic and theoretical style. His common sense, humour, warmth, and individualism made him resemble an old-fashioned family doctor, while at the same time his soaring intellect addressed the most fundamental matters of the mind.Winnicott was a skilled writer with a gift for making his ideas accessible to general readers as well as professionals. He was also a prolific correspondent. This selection of his letters - to colleagues, to the press, and to people who wrote to him about their problems - displays his lively style as well as his characteristic outspokenness and spontaneity. A pediatrician before he became a psychoanalyst, Winnicott was much concerned with the nature of relationships, beginning with that of mother and infant.