The Language of Winnicott

Jan Abram’s lexicon - The Language of Winnicott - has proved to be the definitive comprehensive guide to Winnicott’s thought since it was first published in 1996, Winnicott’s Centenary Year. The twenty-two entries represent the major conceptualizations in Winnicott’s theories and take the reader on a journey through his writings that span from 1931 – 71. Thus the volume is an anthology of the entirety of Winnicott’s writings.

This new edition, with a new bibliography by Knud Hjulmud, expands on each original entry predicated on Abram’s research discoveries, including archival material, over the past decade.

Thomas Ogden introduces Abram’s dictionary by emphasising the experience of reading Winnicott’s words. Abram’s accomplishment, he writes, is comparable to the Oxford English Dictionary which offers the reader ‘the history of the way a word or term has been used and how that usage has changed and is in the process of further change’. The hall mark of The Language of Winnicott is that it demonstrates how Winnicott’s use of words creates a version of psychoanalysis that is a ‘very living thing’.

Knud Hjulmand has been working on creating a definitive Winnicott bibliography. For the first time this new edition of The Language of Winnicott will include the most recently revised, chronological and alphabetical, bibliography of all the published works of D.W.Winnicott.

Knud Hjulmand is a clinical psychologist and child psychotherapist in private practice in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a member of the Danish Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with children and adolescents and member of the Advisory Board for The Journal of Child Psychotherapy. He teaches and supervises for the University of Copenhagen and has several publications in Scandinavian Journals. He is bibliographer for the forthcoming Collected Psychoanalytic Works of D.W.Winnicott.