Trist was much influenced by Melanie Klein, who visited the Tavistock, as well as by his colleagues John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion and Jock Sutherland.

At this time, he was associated with John Bowlby, D. W. Winnicott and Charles Rycroft.

Donald Woods Winnicott ( 7 April 1896 – 28 January 1971 ) was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory.

Winnicott was born in Plymouth, Devon to Sir John Frederick Winnicott, a merchant who was knighted in 1924 after serving twice as mayor of Plymouth, and his wife, Elizabeth Martha ( Woods ) Winnicott.

The family was prosperous and ostensibly happy, but behind the veneer, Winnicott saw himself as oppressed by his mother, who tended toward depression, as well as by his two sisters and his nanny.

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.

Among contemporaries influenced by Winnicott was R. D.

Winnicott died in 1971 following the last of a series of heart attacks and was cremated in London.

Part of that loving care was the mother's attentive holding of her child ; and ' as Winnicott ( 1965 ) suggested, the therapist recreates a " holding environment ", that resembles that of the mother and infant '.

One of the elements Winnicott considered could be lost in childhood was what he called the sense of being.

The ' capacity to " be ", to feel alive ... the baby's lifeline, what Winnicott calls its " going on being "' was essential if a person was not to be ' caught up in a false self and a compulsive cycle of " doing " to conceal the absence of " being "'.

Departing radically from orthodox psychoanalytic thought at the time, which held that analysis helped patients mainly by making them more aware of and insightful about their unconscious beliefs and wishes, Winnicott thought that playing was the key to emotional and psychological well-being.

Winnicott saw a danger in psychoanalysis as it was being practiced in his time: Patients could feel pressured to comply with their analyst's authoritative interpretations, whether or not the patient experienced them as useful or enlivening or true to their own experience, and in this way analysis could end up merely reinforcing a patient's false self disorder.

Winnicott believed that it was only in playing that people are entirely their true selves, so it followed that for psychoanalysis to be effective, it needed to serve as a mode of playing.

One example of how Winnicott used play in his work was the " squiggle game " in his child consultations ( Winnicott 1958: ch.

Another, more famous instance was the " spatula " game, where Winnicott would place a " spatula " ( tongue depressor )— an object always available in a pediatrician's office — within a child's reach for him to play with.

But babies who lack this kind of external protection, Winnicott thought, had to do their best with their own crude defenses.

' Donald Winnicott came to psychoanalysis from paediatrics, and ... through his analysis with James Strachey ', and his work with children and their mothers fed into the experience on which he built his most influential concepts, such as the " holding environment " so crucial to psychotherapy, and the " transitional object ," known to every parent as the " security blanket.

Donald Winnicott summarizes the schizoid need to modulate emotional interaction with others with his comment that schizoid individuals " prefer to make relationships on their own terms and not in terms of the impulses of other people ," and failing to attain that, they prefer isolation.

At the end of the day, Winnicott is one of the few twentieth-century analysts who, in stature, breadth ( and minuteness ) of observations, and theoretical fertility can perhaps legitimately be compared to Sigmund Freud: ' some genius analysts, such as Freud and Winnicott ... learned naturally how to learn from their patients.

Thus to Winnicott, ' for maturity it is necessary the individuals shall not mature early ... passed through all the immature stages, all the stages of maturity at the younger ages '.

For example, where other psychoanalysts used the Freudian terminology of ego and id to describe different functions of a person's psychology, Winnicott at times used " self " to refer to both.

This is why D. W. Winnicott suggests that ' when your infant shows that he can cry from sadness you can infer that he has travelled a long way in the development of his feelings .... some people think that sad crying is one of the main roots of the more valuable kind of music '.

Winnicott pointed out that no one demands that a toddler explain whether his Binky is a " real bear " or a creation of the child's own imagination, and went on to argue that it's very important that the child is allowed to experience the Binky as being in an undefined, " transitional " status between the child's imagination and the real world outside the child.

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.

The result, for Winnicott, could be the creation of what he called ' the False Self .... Other people's expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of our being.

Winnicott thought that one of the developmental hurdles for an infant to get past is the risk of being traumatized by having to be too aware too soon of how small and helpless she really is.

Winnicott thought that In health, a False Self was what allowed one to present a " polite and mannered attitude " in public.

Winnicott related the concept of transitional object to a more general one, transitional phenomena, which he considered to be the basis of science, religion and all of culture.

Otto Rank explored birth trauma's importance ( Rank, 1929 ), and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott provided clinical evidence, from regression sessions, on ego observation to its being regressed as far as prenatal life.

Winnicott too has his critics, suggesting that his theory of the way ' the False Self is invented to manage a prematurely important object ... enacts a kind of dissociated regard or recognition of the object ' is itself rooted in ' his own childhood experience of trying to " make my living " by keeping his mother alive '.

Winnicott described himself as a disturbed adolescent, reacting against his own self-restraining " goodness " acquired from trying to assuage the dark moods of his mother.

Winnicott described minutely ' the business of picking a baby up ... gathering her together ', and the way that the ' mother's technique of holding, of bathing, of feeding, everything she did for the baby, added up to the child's first idea of the mother '.

Winnicott considered that the ' child's ability to feel the body is the place where the psyche lives could not have been developed without a consistent technique of handling ', and he extrapolated ' the idea of " holding " and of meeting dependence ' from the mother to the family as a whole, and to the wider world surrounding it.

Winnicott thought that the " True Self " begins to develop in infancy, in the relationship between the baby and her primary caretaker ( Winnicott typically refers to this person as " the mother ").

Nevertheless, what has been called ' his identification with an ideal mother ' could perhaps lead to a derivative idealisation of family life: indeed, arguably, with ' the theoretical icon of the mother and child Winnicott sometimes uses psychoanalysis to redescribe a traditional theology ... psychoanalysis was incorporated into a Christian empiricist tradition '.

* Psychoanalytic: Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott ( among others ); Object relations theory ; Neo-Freudianism

In 1951, Donald Winnicott presented his theory of transitional objects and phenomena, according to which childish actions like thumb sucking and objects like cuddly toys are the source of manifold adult behavior, amongst many others fetishism.

Nevertheless, Winnicott did not underestimate the need as well for a false self, seeing indeed ' the False Self ... as a necessary defensive organization, a survival kit, a caretaker self, the means by which a threatened person has managed to survive '.

# Less severely, the false self protects the true self, which remains unactualised-for Winnicott a clear example of a clinical condition organised for the positive goal of preservating the individual in spite of abnormal environmental conditions of the environment.

Winnicott believed that ' in health there is a core of the personality which corresponds to the true self ', and which ' must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality.

Connected to the concept of holding is ' pre-delinquent behaviour, which Winnicott calls " the anti-social tendency ".

From this Winnicott derived his idea of how ' the infant needs " a period of hesitation " in which to rediscover ' - again a concept transferred to analytic work: ' the analyst needs to tolerate what Winnicott speaks of as " the period of hesitation "... allowing the patient to use the analyst as someone who is there to be found ... to be shoved down patients ' throats '.

Playing for Winnicott ultimately extended all the way up from earliest childhood to ' the abstractions of politics and economics and philosophy and culture ... this third area, that of cultural experience which is a derivative of play '.

Similarly for Lacan, despite his personal respect for Winnicott, the latter was implicated in the ' contradiction between the pre-Oedipal intrigue, to which, in the opinion of certain of our modern analysts, the analytic relation can be reduced, and the fact that Freud was satisfied with having situated it in the position of the Oedipus complex ... lead to a propedeutics of general infantilization.

Fairbairn and Donald Winnicott into a transpersonal therapy which seeks to heal through awareness and the holding field.