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This is a book about heroes, psychoanalytic heroes, of whom, claims Rudnytsky, we are all in need after Freud. Here is a telling moment from the life of Rudnytsky's hero, told by his wife:
CW: I think there's one famous episode in his life, when he was nine, and he looked in the mirror and he said, ‘I'm too nice’. And really, from this point he started coming bottom of his class. Blotting everything, blotting his copybook, shoving things around, torturing flies, pulling their wings off. You know, just doing naughty things.
Interviewer: Did he like naughtiness? Was he in favor of naughtiness?
C W: He wanted to find this other dimension in himself. ‘I'm too good! I'm coming top all the time! Everybody likes me too much! I must find the nastiness in myself!’
This is an excerpt from an interview given by Clare Winnicott in 1983, published here for the first time and which alone makes this book worthwhile. For Rudnytsky Donald Winnicott is the figure who best embodies the virtues of the vocation of psychoanalysis, a man fundamentally decent, whose idea of decency involves knowing about the nastiness in himself. Rudnytsky admires Winnicott's independence and openness of mind, his lack of interest in establishing disciples or a school. He considers Winnicott's theoretical contributions to be of paramount importance in the rewriting of classical Freudian theory in terms of object relations, with its focus on the maternal, environmental and pre-oedipal facets of experience, which were either underplayed or missed out by Freud. And he pays tribute to Winnicott's direct and unpretentious clinical style, his capacity to understand his patients and to put them in touch with their creativity in everyday living. What for Rudnytsky marks Winnicott out from so many other psychoanalysts is his basic optimism, his belief in human nature. So, one can imagine, it is characteristic of Winnicott that, when he looks in the mirror, he sees not the outward show of an inner progression towards de