Book excerpt: The Family and Individual Development represents a decade of writing from a thinker who was at the peak of his powers as perhaps the leading post-war figure in developmental psychiatry. In these pages, Winnicott chronicles the complex inner lives of human beings, from the first encounter between mother and newborn, through the 'doldrums' of adolescence, to maturity. As Winnicott explains in his final chapter, the health of a properly functioning democratic society 'derives from the working of the ordinary good home.'