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'''Donald Woods Winnicott''' ([[7 April]],[[1896]] - [[January 28]], [[1971]]) was a pediatrician and [[psychoanalyst]]. [[Born ]] in [[Plymouth]], [[Devon]], [[England]], to a prosperous middle-[[class ]] [[Methodism|Methodist]] [[family]]; the son of Sir Frederick (a merchant) and Elizabeth Martha (Woods) Winnicott. [[Married ]] Alice Taylor in 1923; divorced in 1951. Married Elsie Clare Nimmo ("Clare") Britton, a [[psychiatric ]] [[social ]] worker and psychoanalyst, in 1951.

Spending his [[childhood ]] in Plymouth, Winnicott was one of very few famous impacting [[clinical ]] psychologists who had an unturbulent childhood. Later, deciding to become a doctor, he began to study [[medicine ]] at the [[Leys School]] followed by [[Jesus College, Cambridge|Jesus College]], both in [[Cambridge]]. There was a hiatus to his studies while he served as probationer surgeon on a British [[destroyer]] in [[World War I]]. He completed his medical studies in 1920, and in 1923, the same year as his first [[marriage ]] (to Alice Taylor), he got a post as physician at the Paddington Green [[Children]]'s Hospital in [[London]], where he was to [[work ]] as a pediatrician and [[child ]] [[psychoanalysis|psycho-analyst]] for 40 years.

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. By the end of [[World ]] War Two, a compromise established [[three ]] more or less amicable groups in [[psychotherapy]]: the Freudians, the Kleinians and a "Middle" group, to which Winnicott belonged.

His career involved many of the great [[figures ]] in [[psychoanalysis ]] and [[psychology]], not just [[Klein ]] and Anna [[Freud]], but many [[Bloomsbury, London|Bloomsbury]] figures such as [[James Strachey]], [[R. D. Laing]], and Masud Khan, a wealthy Pakistani emigre who was a highly controversial [[psycho]]-[[analyst]].

Winnicott's [[treatment ]] of psychically disturbed children and their mothers gave him 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." He had a major impact on [[object ]] relations [[theory]], particularly in his 1951 essay "Transitional [[Objects ]] and Transitional Phenomena," which focused on familiar, inanimate objects that children use to stave off [[anxiety ]] during [[times ]] of stress.

His [[theoretical ]] writings emphasized [[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]]."

 [[Category:1896 births|Winnicott, Donald]][[Category:1971 deaths|Winnicott, Donald]][[Category:Psychologists|Winnicott, Donald Woods]][[Category:PlymothiansPsychology|Winnicott, Donald Woods]]