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What you get out of me, you will have to pick out of chaos.
This summer marked the publication of Robert Rodman's long awaited biography of D.W. Winnicott, Winnicott: Life and Work. Rodman, an American psychoanalyst, previously edited The Spontaneous Gesture (1987), a collection of Winnicott's letters. This first full-scale biography of Winnicott comes at a propitious moment. In 2001 Wynne Godley published “Saving Masud Khan,” an autobiographical account of his disastrous analysis with Khan, which raised serious questions about Winnicott's knowledge of and complicity in Khan's actions, and has led to somber, even painful, discussions in the analytic community on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the controversy has also led to a variety of gossip, accusation, and innuendo previously the hallmark of tabloid journalism. With the notoriety that surrounds Winnicott threatening to overshadow his legacy, Rodman's measured account of Winnicott's life and work could not be more timely.
Born in 1896, Winnicott came to psychoanalysis by way of pediatrics. He was first analyzed by James Strachey, but the greatest influence on his thinking was his supervision with Melanie Klein. Her ideas gave depth to his work, and much of his writing can be seen as a dialogue with her. Not a follower, Winnicott lived a creative, untidy life, with an insistence upon “being himself” (p. 9) even to the point of bending the rules. Rycroft referred to him as a “crypto-prima donna” (as quoted in Grosskurth, 1986, p. 399). A prolific writer known for his intuitive flashes of insight rather than his logical argument or organization, Winnicott rewrote the theory of the earliest stages of development in his own idiom, in a language that sometimes illuminates, sometimes obfuscates, but is always unforgettable.