Donald Woods Winnicott was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Plymouth, England, in 1896. Deciding to become a doctor, he began to study medicine in Cambridge but broke off to serve as probationer surgeon on a British destroyer in World War One. He completed his medical studies in 1920 and in 1923, the same year as his first marriage, got a post as physician at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London. Also in 1923, Winnicott entered into a personal analysis with Freud's English translator, James Strachey. In 1927 Winnicott was accepted for training by the British Psycho-Analytical Society, qualified as an adult analyst in 1934 and as a child analyst in 1935. He was still working at the children's hospital and commented later that "at that time no other analyst was also a paediatrician so for two or three decades I was an isolated phenomenon." The treatment of psychically disturbed children and their mothers gave him experience on which he would later build his most original theories. And the short time he could spend on each case led to his development of "therapeutic consultations." (See below, Innovations in clinical practice.)

Another child analyst, Melanie Klein, moved to London in 1926 and soon had many followers: Winnicott had further analysis with one of them, Joan Rivière. The Kleinians' belief in the paramount importance, for psychic health, of the first year of a child's life, was shared by Winnicott. But this view diverged somewhat from that of Freud and his daughter Anna (herself a child analyst!) who both came to London in 1938, refugees from the Nazis in Austria. A split within the British Psycho-Analytical Society was threatened between the orthodox Freudians and the Kleinians; but by the end of World War Two in 1945 a typically British compromise established three more or less amicable groups: the Freudians, the Kleinians and a "Middle" group, to which Winnicott belonged.

However, for Winnicott the war years were more important for the opportunities they gave him to work with seriously disturbed children who had been evacuated from London and other big cities, and separated from their family. His experience as a psychiatric consultant to the Government Evacuation Scheme provided an impetus towards new thinking about the significance of the mother's role. He also became aware of the fact that therapy was more than a case of "making the right interpretation at the right moment" and of the importance of what he called "management". His second marriage, in 1951, was to Clare Britton, the psychiatric social worker with whom he had collaborated during the war years.

After the war Winnicott was physician in charge of the Child Department of the Institute of Psychoanalysis for 25 years; he was president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society for 2 terms; a member of UNESCO and WHO study groups, and lectured widely and wrote as well as having a private practice. He continued to work at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital into the 1960's.

He died in 1971 following the last of a series of heart attacks and was cremated in London.