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Winnicott was an avid reader of biographies. Or rather, he was an avid reader of the first few chapters of biographies, those dealing with the subject's childhood and adolescence. The rest could be taken as read. Faced, therefore, with this new full-length biography of Winnicott, one is tempted to wonder what he himself might have made of its early pages. For one thing Rodman's account starts not at the
beginning of his life, nor at the end, where Winnicott chose to begin his own brief, incomplete autobiography. Instead he introduces us to Winnicott the fully-fledged psychoanalyst at nearly fifty addressing a scientific meeting of his fellows in 1945 on the subject of ‘Primitive Emotional Development’. Rodman's purpose is clear: to convey from the outset the style and flavour of Winnicott the man - his independence of mind, his admitted ‘stealing’ of ideas from others that can only be given back when stamped with the imprint of his own mind; the creative impetus from his not yet openly admitted affair with Clare Britton, later to become his second wife; above all the first signs of his non-compliance with the expectations of the Kleinian circle into which he had been inscribed as a trainee psychoanalyst a decade before and from which he was to spend the next decade painfully extricating himself in search of his own personal and professional identity.
I came to this biography with a sense of keen anticipation. A proper account of Winnicott's life was badly needed and Rodman had already distinguished himself with his capable editing of a selection of Winnicott's letters (Rodman, 1987). I was not too disconcerted by his decision to plunge into the story of Winnicott's life in the middle. Winnicott would have been the first to recognise that an understanding of context was as important for a biography as environment for infancy. And it had the Winnicott stamp of the unexpected.
What did disconcert, however, was the slackness of expression and inaccuracy of detail eviden