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It is remarkable that a book by a layman about a psychoanalyst's work should remain, as this does, in touch with the intention of his writings. Many of his colleagues, because of professional assumptions, could not do the same task. For Davis' approach has the freshness and sparkle that discovery for oneself and from outside, can bring; this means that Dr Wallbridge as an analyst has seen his role as that of not impairing this freshness while he has eliminated clangers which, without professional and inside knowledge, might have been unavoidable.
The skill with which the feeling and contact are conveyed is partly a comment on Winnicott's way of writing but it also has to do with Mrs Davis' special experience as the wife of a paediatrician and as a woman who has brought up a family. Davis' style shares with Winnicott himself a donnish mixture of arrogance and humility. Take these excerpts as a credit both for Winnicott's approach and Davis' sensitivity in selection: Winnicott is quoted as saying first,
We find that when we are face to face with a man, woman or child in our speciality, we are reduced to two human beings of equal status. Hierarchies drop away (p. 26).
and then:
it was as a practicing paediatrician that I found the therapeutic value of history taking … Psychoanalysis for me is a vast extension of history taking, with therapeutics as a by product (p. 27).
Winnicott's throw away attitude assumes that but for accidents anybody might have been a psychoanalyst, a paediatrician and also uniquely sensitive to the observable phenomena of the mother–infant pair. This can annoy and has annoyed those who lean upon their status, especially if they cannot lay claim to the last two qualities.
Winnicott's relaxed attitude was often misjudged in his time but it was not carelessness; Winnicott respected institutions. His record as President of the British Society for two terms of office, and in his negotiations about French psychoanalysis as well as the constant stre