Winnicott: Life and Work

by F. Robert Rodman

This beautifully written and long-awaited biography is the first full-scale life of the great British psychoanalyst, a major figure both in psychiatry and as a principle influence on the leading child development experts of our time, including Brazelton, Spock, and Stanley Greenspan.A pediatrician turned analyst, D. W. Winnicott rose to prominence in the stormy days when the followers of Anna Freud were battling those of Melanie Klein for the right to be called Freud's true intellectual heirs. This rich, witty, and insightful story probes the autobiographical sources of Winnicott's influential concepts, such as the "holding environment" so crucial to psychotherapy and the "transitional object" known to every parent as the "security blanket." Winnicott's astonishing career involves many of the great figures in psychoanalysis and psychology, not just Klein and Anna Freud but the whole eccentric Bloomsbury scene including the Stracheys, R. D. Laing, and the controversial Pakistani prince and analyst Masud Khan.Readers of Oliver Sacks, Janet Malcolm, and Peter Gay, as well as anyone interested in the great explorers of human nature, will find this book passionately absorbing.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Biography

464 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2003

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is difficult to understand the ideas of any psychoanalytic theorist--whether Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Donald Winnicott, or anyone else--without learning about that person's biography. In effect, one must do a sort of analysis of the theorist. Winnicott is an especially sympathetic figure. Fairly late in life, after twenty-seven years in a completely celibate, "caretaking" marriage, he divorced his first wife and married the woman with whom he had been in love for several years. By that time, he had suffered several attacks of coronary thrombosis and felt his life was at stake. Also late in life, he had to shake up his professional relationships, distancing himself from the likes of Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere while trying hard not to alienate them altogether. Klein and her followers had tried hard to bring Winnicott within a rigid Kleinian discipline that ensured that his ideas would be subordinated to her own. He freed himself and embarked on several decades of astonishing creativity. Unlike Klein, who was more concerned with an infant's fantasies about an imagined mother, Winnicott insisted that the actual mother and environment must be taken into account in psychoanalysis.
We owe Winnicott very much--from his elaborations on "transitional objects" to his notion that certain patients require not just analytical interpretations of the transference but a regression to dependency from which stage they can begin to achieve integration and wholeness.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slowly but surely getting through this one.
For anyone interested in psychoanlysis this one is well worth it.

[Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought this book ten years ago and finally got around to it. I bought the book because he has been referenced in so many books I've read over the years, starting in the seventies, (or was it the eighties?) when I read The Culture of Narcissism, which led me to reading a bit, one book each, of Kohut and Kernberg. I guess I'd consider myself a Psychoanalysis buff, since I've never been analyzed. Never could afford it. I've had supportive therapy; several therapists over a long lifetime, I'm pushing 73, and have been in the well known recovery program, anonymous don'tcha know...
anywayz; I loved this book. My kinda guy. Impotent. Then not impotent. Full of hate, which led to love which led to more hate, which led to being considered an outsider, which eventually led to his being revered. I guess for me the next best thing to being analyzed is to read about it. P.S. Recently an old friend, a woman who, when I was twelve, called me a pre-adolescent, disparagingly of course, told me that because my political stance was different than hers, I was having a Reaction Formation. She's not my kind of Freudian.
P.S., goes without saying, don't read this book unless you have some background knowledge of Freud et. al.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little hagiographical at times, repeatedly reminding us how brilliant Winnicott was. And some of the psychological speculation will seem gratuitous and unconvincing to people not in the psychoanalytic fold. But a very readable and thorough biography, and very informative on many other important figures in British psychoanalysis.

[Sergio Gomes]

The life and work of Winnicott is presented in detail by Rodman in that book that became the bible of the author. Tems knowledge of his pediatric training, psychoanalytic training his illness and death, and he dealt with all the circling, particularly the presence of his wife Clare Winnicott.