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Donald W. Winnicott's admirers, whether psychoanalysts or not, will be delighted with this book. Here is the great man, in full action, handling, holding, curing, healing a well-known psychoanalyst who unveils memories of her youth, her family, her sickness for the benefit of the reader.
Margaret Little holds us spellbound from the first to the last paragraph of her book, so rich and condensed in spite of its apparent brevity.
Written with clarity and alertness, it captivates the reader as a good novel or even a thriller does. At other times it leads us to the heart of difficult theoretical and practical problems such as regression. Nevertheless, in my opinion, these problems are tackled in such a way that they will not discourage the non-analyst reader, holding his interest as well as that of the analyst.
One's interest is held by these 120 odd pages, filled with emotion, enthusiasm and gratitude from a patient who claims to have been a psychotic borderline case cured by a treatment (a psychoanalysis?) conducted like a fully-fledged battle against death, by the couple Winnicott-Little, a kind of living metaphor of a mother and her toddler.
It is of course when the reading is done that all sorts of questions arise, as if one had to wake up, open one's eyes and place oneself at a suitable distance in order to regain some critical sense. About the problem of reality, for instance, the writer's talent makes us believe in the factual reality of Margaret Little's history—her childhood, the circumstances of her life—a reality which makes us forget that it is constructed and interpreted through the double process of representation and writing. And Winnicott's comments strengthen one's feeling of uneasiness, when, for example, he cries out his hatred of this woman—the patient's mother—such a monster … (who, by the way, was still alive at the time). There Winnicott seems to go beyond transference into identification and recognition of a reality mistaken for the veracity of