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Britain's Donald W. Winnicott (1896-1971) was one of the genuinely original thinkers in modern psychoanalysis. D. W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait is the first installment of Brett Kahr's work on Winnicott; his “Preface” here tells us that he will shortly be publishing a full text on Winnicott's life and work, as well as a volume of essays to celebrate Winnicott's one hundredth birthday. Although Winnicott lived in a professional community beset by ideological rivalry between the adherents of Anna Freud as opposed to the disciples of Melanie Klein, Winnicott himself succeeded in avoiding sectarianism, at the same time as his work has been absorbed within the so-called mainstream of psychoanalysis.
It has proven difficult to reconstruct much about Winnicott's childhood in Plymouth. His father was a successful merchant, and for his various public services was knighted by King George V. Kahr seems to think that Winnicott's father was inadequately attentive to his only son, especially given Winnicott's mother's proclivity to depressions. Winnicott had two older sisters, both of whom remained unmarried. He himself was sent to boarding school in Cambridge, where he developed an interest in the natural sciences. Winnicott decided on becoming a medical doctor, even though that career in England lacked the social prestige it has acquired elsewhere. He specialized in paediatrics, and soon became a psychoanalytic child psychiatrist.
In 1923 he married his first wife, and the marriage lasted for twenty-five years. The couple, however, was plagued by problems; she became emotionally unbalanced, and he appears to have been impotent. For some ten years Winnicott remained in analysis with James Strachey; Winnicott's buoyantly spontaneous charm contrasted with Strachey's skeptical intellectualism and aloofness. Since winnicott was so interested in children, and Strachey had been partly responsible for getting Ernest Jones to invite Klein to London, Strachey encouraged Winnicott t