Donald Winnicott - Career

Career

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Psychoanalysis
Concepts Psychosexual development
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Unconscious · Preconscious
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Psychic apparatus
Id, ego and super-ego
Libido · Drive
Transference
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Ego defenses · Resistance
Projection · Denial
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Paul Federn · Otto Fenichel
Sándor Ferenczi
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Isidor Sadger · James Strachey
Ernst Simmel · Harry Stack Sullivan
Susan Sutherland Isaacs
Donald Winnicott
Important works (1899)
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1901)
The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life
(1905)
Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality
(1920)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1923)
The Ego and the Id
Schools of thought Self psychology · Lacanian
Jungian · Object relations
Interpersonal · Relational
Ego psychology
Training Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis
British Psychoanalytic Council
British Psychoanalytical Society
Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
International Psychoanalytical Association
Psychology portal

He completed his medical studies in 1920, and in 1923, the same year as his first marriage (to Alice Taylor), he obtained a post as physician at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London, where he was to work as a pediatrician 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. His second analysis, beginning in 1936, was with Joan Riviere.

Winnicott rose to prominence just as the followers of Anna Freud were battling 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 established with three more-or-less amicable groups of the psychoanalytic movement: the Freudians, the Kleinians, and the "Middle Group" of the British Psychoanalytical Society (later called the "Independent Group"), to which Winnicott belonged, along with Ronald Fairbairn, Michael Balint, Masud Khan, John Bowlby, Marion Milner, and Margaret Little. Winnicott was trained by Melanie Klein but became increasingly independent in his thinking over the course of his career, ultimately contributing original ideas which emphasized the importance of play in psychological development.

During the Second World War, Winnicott served as consultant psychiatrist to the evacuee 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. He divorced his first wife in 1951 and, in the same year, married Britton. After the war he also saw patients in his private practice. Among contemporaries influenced by Winnicott was R.D. Laing, who wrote to Winnicott in 1958 acknowledging his help.

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 in 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.

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