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In psychoanalysis, biographies have always been the chief mode of history writing, that is, the mode upon which the quality of our historical self-consciousness chiefly depends. So, even though we have very little literature about biography writing, we should nonetheless try to hold them to standards as high as those we have for our science. With that principle in mind, I am going to offer not so much a review of Rodman's Winnicott: Life and work as a little treatise on the art of biography with it as an example.
Rodman's biography does have all the ingredients of a good biography, and it is informative and, in places, illuminating. The research base is there: interviews with Winnicott's second wife, Clare, and others of his circle who were living when the biography began in 1988; many correspondences (including the letters Rodman, as editor, selected for The spontaneous gesture (1987); parts of the archives of the British Society; family reminiscences and photographs. Biographies of and unpublished writings by key close analytic colleagues—the three ‘mothers’ Joan Riviere, Marion