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‘The theories of Philosophers are necessarily concealed autobiography’ (Nietzsche). Winnicott's theories are variously received as uniquely illuminating or as opaque and difficult. Brett Kahr now gives us a glimpse of the biography behind the work and ideas of the world-renowned paediatrician and psychoanalyst. Although it is the first whole book devoted to Winnicott's life it remains a sketch rather than a comprehensive biography and will be followed by a more extended piece of biographical research and a guide to Winnicott's published work by the same author.
There are perils in writing the biography of someone who is still remembered, and still controversial. In an introduction to the Biographical Portrait, Dr Susanna Isaacs Elmhirst, a psychoanalyst who had a long involvement with Winnicott and his work with children and parents in the NHS, cautions readers to approach Kahr's sketch (and indeed their thoughts about Winnicott) with a healthily sceptical appetite but concedes that in this book Kahr does ‘strike home’ a great deal. Although Kahr does not attempt to review Winnicott's work or to trace the influence of his ideas within the development of psychoanalysis he does engage with some of the contradictions in the life of this subtle and interesting man and in how his work was received. He was the first man to qualify in child psychoanalysis, was chosen by Melanie Klein to analyse one of her own children and was twice President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Yet, at a certain stage in the 1960s, Esther Bick discouraged the students training in child