Winnicott : Life and Work

A paediatrician turned analyst, D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971) 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 intellectual heirs.

This rich, witty, and insightful story probes the roots in Winnicott's personal life of his influential and now familiar concepts, such as the wise and liberating notion of the 'good enough mother', the 'holding environment', so crucial to psychotherapy, and the 'transitional object' known to every parent as the 'security blanket'.

His astonishing career involves many of the great figures in psychoanalysis and psychology, not just Klein and Anna Freud, but also the whole lively and eccentric Bloomsbury and analytic scene including the Stracheys, R.D.

Laing, Jacques Lacan, Ronald Fairbairn, and the controversial Pakistani analyst and self-anointed prince Masud Khan.

Of all those who have plumbed the human mind, Winnicott speaks most to us today because he wrote in understandable language about universal human concerns, attachment and separation, love and loss. Without jargon and yet with an overarching theory that extended the range of psychoanalytic thought, he puts us in touch with the everyday lives of all people from infancy to old age.

Winnicott, in Dr. Rodman's magnificent portrait, is always himself, always human, always one of us.

Anyone interested not only in psychology and psychoanalysis but also in human nature and the great figures who have explored it will find this book passionately absorbing.