This bold and witty, yet scholarly biography is the first to trace the full life and work of this highly influential and brilliant pediatrician-turned-analyst. This insightful story probes the roots in Winnicott's personal life of his influential concepts, such as the holding environment so crucial to psychotherapy and the transitional object known to every parent as the security blanket. His astonishing career involved many of the great figures in psychoanalysis and psychology, not just Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, but the whole eccentric Bloomsbury scene including the Stracheys, R. D. Laing, and the controversial Pakistani prince and analyst, Masud Khan. For anyone interested not only in psychology and psychoanalysis but also in human nature and the great figures who have explored it, this book will be passionately absorbing.