The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment.

Abstract

This is the fourth volume of Winnicott's to be published in the United States. This remarkable work has sent this reviewer back to the other three, since it is one of the richest and most significant volumes in its contribution to applied psychoanalysis and especially child psychiatry. These essays, written between 1957 and 1963, are a synthesis of abundant clinical experiences, profound personal creativity and thought, and a blending of past and present psychoanalytic theory and practice. This combination makes for a most exhilarating and gratifying encounter. As a onetime pediatrician, he moves with surety through the complex trails of development, illuminating a range of phenomena in a classic literary style. In these days of accent on social and community psychiatry, psychoanalytic parameters, dilution of training for psychotherapy, brief therapies for variously colored collar workers, distorted approaches to poverty programs and delinquency, it is heartening and refreshing to read in