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This book is the outcome of a great deal of research into the life and work of D. W. Winnicott, unquestionably one of the two or three most inf luential psychoanalysts after Freud. F. Robert Rodman, whose previous work includes a useful volume of Winnicott's letters (Rodman 1987), is a California analyst trained within the American Psychoanalytic Association. He especially acknowledges the influence of Leo Rangell and has been an admirer of Winnicott's work since early in his own analytic development in the 1960s.
Biographies, especially those with psychoanalytic intentions, proposing to link formative experiences with later achievements, are hazardous undertakings under the best of circumstances and perhaps even more so when they are written for analysts about an analyst. When the subject is one of the most creative and brilliantly imaginative free spirits in our discipline, who wrote with a notoriously deceptive simplicity about phenomena that are both experience-near and deep, moreover, we can readily appreciate the difficulty of the author's task. While an informative short biography of Winnicott has already appeared (Kahr 1996), this is the first full-scale attempt to consider his life and work. After Winnicott's death in 1971, his widow Clare granted Rodman access to an extensive collection of her husband's letters and documents. After her death in 1984, he and Madeleine Davis, a member of the Winnicott Board of Editors, agreed to jointly write this biography. While not an analyst herself, Davis was well acquainted with Winnicott and his work. The two biographers launched their undertaking some fifteen years ago, interviewing Winnicott's friends, family, and associates. Unfortunately, Davis died soon thereafter, and Rodman courageously decided to continue on his own.
The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with Winnicott's early life, education, his two marriages, analyses first with James