Winnicott looks at the area of medicine known as Child Psychiatry. He sees psychiatry as based on the emotional growth of the normal infant, child, adolescent, and adult, and their developing relationship to external reality. Psychiatry covers the area that is at the borderline between physical and emotional growth in children. The paediatrician who knows the physical side of child care, in Winnicott’s view, cannot just ‘slip over’ to understanding and practising child psychiatry. As a psychoanalyst Winnicott advocates psychotherapy in order to study the whole child. As an analyst who is also a child psychiatrist, Winnicott values his understanding of the emotional development of the individual. He advocates the specialist teaching and training of child psychiatry, because in the individual’s emotional development is contained society’s potential for family functioning and for the institution and maintenance of social groupings.
