You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Robert Rodman's book is a tour de force of psychoanalytic sensibility and eloquent scholarship. The book is in effect a psychoanalytic Bildungsroman, that is, a reconstruction, critique, and intervention all in one. It is an example of what Erikson may have meant by “disciplined subjectivity,” rising to interpretive cunning.
Rodman, a psychoanalyst and “artist under oath,” as biographers have been called, sustains his narrative with sensitive fidelity to fact. Pirandello observed: “A fact is like a sock which won't stand up when it's empty. In order that it stand up one has to put into it the reason and feeling which have caused it to exist” (quoted by Wrightsman, 1994, p. 183.) Putting reason and feeling into the facts of Winnicott's life is like the colloquial “putting socks on a rooster.” “Negative capability” notwithstanding, the effort may be unavoidably paradoxical—a deep dialectical tease. There is little prescriptive fit in Rodman, and perhaps more of the “loving struggle” that Karl Jaspers conceived the writing of biography to be. Brett Kahr's preliminary work, D. W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait (1996) offers a clipped rendering of lively fact. Rodman's work is far more comprehensive. It is neither a “warts-and-all” biography, Stracheyesque (Lytton) in style, nor is it ironical combination of hagiography and pathography, but rather clinician on clinician in the play space of the scholar's cell. Rodman