Attachment, Play, and Authenticity: A Winnicott Primer

This is the best integration of Donald Winnicott’s oeuvre to date. It takes from Winnicott’s work what is most clinically relevant today and builds upon it, making it ‘real’ but never losing the poetic richness of Winnicott’s contributions. This book is a wonderful presentation of Winnicott’s work, from which both Winnicott and the author emerge with immense distinction. — Peter Fonagy, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis and director, Sub-Department of Clinical Health Psychology, University College London

This book will be invaluable to mental health professionals unfamiliar with Winnicott’s work or those of us who need a refresher. It is a comprehensive, wise, and unusually readable summary of Winnicott’s key conceptual contributions and his approach to therapy. Steve Tuber is a first rate clinician and scholar….I regard him as well as his book as a true gift to the field of child therapy. ― New York Play Therapy Association Newsletter

Those who take the time to play with Tuber and Winnicott will be the better for it. Highly recommended. All readers, all levels. ― CHOICE, Aug. 2008

This is a breathtaking book. Winnicott’s humanity, generosity, humor, and brilliance leap off the page in Steven Tuber’s loving, creative, and magnificent contemplation of his work. — Arietta Slade PhD, professor of psychology, City University of New York at City College

In this clear and creatively written book, the reader is offered an unusual experience. Steve Tuber does more than make available a detailed examination of the theoretical and clinical contributions of D.W. Winnicott. As the metaphor of the title of this excellent book expresses, with each chapter Tuber invites and encourages the reader to step into a playroom and sand box and interact, participate and play with one of Winnicott’s core concepts and techniques which Tuber presents to the reader as a dilemma to work through and sort out, before embracing the solution. During the past 25 years, interest in relational psychology and psychoanalysis has surged including the revival of contributions by early writers. Tuber does an outstanding job reviving the contributions of Winnicott for this movement. The author’s presentation of these contributions will be highly valuable and benefit very experienced psychogynamic therapists as well as students of clinical psychology. — Sebastiano Santostefano, author, Child Therapy in the Great Outdoors: A Relational View

This book, based on a tremendously popular course that Professor Tuber teaches in the City College clinical program, presents Winnicott’s ideas in a way that I think Winnicott himself would have loved. It is clearly a labor of love, filled with the three Ws: wit, wisdom, and Winnicott. — Paul L. Wachtel, distinguished professor of psychology, City University of New York at City College

Winnicott was among the most seminal writers in the first century of psychoanalysis, and his subtle, elusive, and complex ideas are of enormous importance to both child and adult therapists. In this important, scholarly, but very accessible text, Steven Tuber has provided a much-needed and yet reader-friendly introduction to Winnicott’s theoretical and clinical contributions. — Lewis Aron, director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

Steven Tuber’s wonderful Attachment, Play and Authenticity: A Winnicott Primer is essential reading for every psychotherapist. Regardless of one’s orientation or of the clinical population with which one works, this book is a vibrant introduction and explication of one of the most important writers and thinkers in our field. This book is a treasure trove both for those who may already be familiar with the work of Winnicott and for those who have yet to encounter him . . . This clear and clinically relevant book spells out with great clarity and richness the main ideas and structure of Winnicott’s contribution and how to apply them to one’s clinical thinking and work. — Robert Grossmark, PhD ― Psychotherapy:Theory, Research, Training, Practice, December 2009

Tuber captures what I see as the essence of Winnicott’s work, and as Winnicott would have loved, presents it without jargon or pretense in the simple terms that best elucidate Winnicott’s view of the human experience . . . Tuber’s understanding of Winnicott is deep and rich, his explanations are wonderfully clear, his discussion of the extension of Winnicott’s ideas rewarding, and his style humane, personal, and playful. — Linda S. Penn ― Psychotherapy:Theory, Research, Training, Practice, December 2009

While this book is aimed primarily at first-time readers of Winnicott, especially those who are starting out as therapists, Tuber’s attention to papers that are not ordinarily read in clinical training and his efforts to delve deeply into Winnicott’s writing offer a useful second look for more seasoned students of psychoanalytic thought as well. Tuber’s extensive knowledge of Winnicott’s corpus and his lengthy experience in applying Winnicott’s ideas in clinical work with children make him a learned guide, while his enthusiasm and obvious love for Winnicott make him a delightful one. ― The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, February 2009

It is worthwhile reading for both the beginner and the more experienced clinician as a guide to the thinking and humanity of Winnicott and his many important and lasting contributions to our clinical work and our understanding of rational development. ― Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, June 2009

Steven Tuber’s beautifully written Attachment, Play and Authenticity is a tight, smart, and inherently readable volume that serves as a user-friendly guide to the master theoretician and clinician. ― Psychologist-Pscyhoanalyst, Summer 2009

. . . A poignant achievement . . . It is clear that all he brings to bear on this material helps him embody and enliven Winnicott’s legacy, and has provided a welcome addition to Winnicottian scholarship. ‘Creativity,’ Winnicott once remarked, ‘is…the doing that arises out of being.’ We owe Steve Turber a debt of gratitude for offering us a creative piece of doing arising from his own being. — Monica Grady, PhD ― Contemporary Psychoanalysis, January 2010

Although straightforward and accessible, Tuber’s explication of Winnicott’s remarkable and remarkably phrased key concepts transcends its ‘primer’ subtitle, as he grapples with obscure and enigmatic ideas and insists on clarification of the sometimes elusive poetry of Winnicott’s extraordinary work… This ‘primer’ offers the wisdom of Tuber’s years of immersion in Winnicott’s thought, seamlessly combining simplicity and sophistication to produce an engaging book. — Dr. Karen Gilmore ― Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

The volume is a resource that is likely to be referenced frequently by researchers and individual chapters will provide excellent reading material for courses in ecological anthropology. ― Human Ecology, February 2010

This delightful book reads like an in-depth seminar on selected works of Donald Winnicott. . . . Tuber’s selection creates a coherent picture of Winnicott’s theoretical position, organized and informed by the kind of familiarity that a teacher develops over the course of many years of study. . . . Tuber is a friendly and personable guide. . . . This ‘primer’ offers the wisdom of Tuber’s years of immersion in Winnicott’s thought, seamlessly combining simplicity and sophistication to produce an engaging book. ― Journal Of The Amer. Academy Of Child and Adolescent Psych, February 2010

Tuber has chosen to focus on the paradoxes in [Winnicott’s] work and plays with them with creativity and enthusiasm. ― Clinical Social Work Journal, Spring 2010

While described as a primer and written in a beguilingly easy style that is both enthusiastic and playful, this book is a highly contemplative and though-provoking work by an author who clearly and intuitively understands Winnicott….in the weeks since reading this book I have noticed welcome changes in how I think and talk about patients and in the rhythm and style of my interventions, and I believe that it is Tuber’s insightful perspective that has transformed my appreciation of Winnicott into a deeper form of effective understanding. He ends by stating that he hopes he has done Winnicott justice: it is this reviewer’s opinion that he has done that and more. He has written a book that will not only reinforce Winnicott’s historical legacy but that also will perpetuate the continuing relevance and vitality of Winnicott’s works. ― The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, September 2010

It is hard to overestimate the sheer excitement and pleasure to be derived from this remarkable book. Based on a ‘close reading’ of Winnicott’s principal texts, it vividly and logically explicates his central themes―true and false self, authenticity, positive hate, play, creativity and transitional phenomena―all in the context of the parent-infant (or therapist-patient) relationship. Homologous with his chosen subject, Tuber is original, profound, amusing, and truthful, transmuting Winnnicott’s sometimes paradoxical and poetic concepts from nouns into active verbs. He makes the idiosyncratic world of Winnicott seem lucid, accessible, and irrefutable. A must-read for all therapists and analysts, and destined to become one of the key psychology books of the decade. — Jeremy Holmes, MD, FRC, professor, Psychology, University of Exeter, UK