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Tea with Winnicott is the first in Karnac's new series of Interviews with Icons, ‘posthumous interviews’ with psychoanalysis's leading heroes and heroines - the brain child of Brett Kahr, who is co-editor of Karnac's History of Psychoanalysis series. Kahr playfully invites the reader to join him in the sandbox of historical fiction, or what Kahr himself prefers to call ‘imaginative non-fiction’ as Kahr constructs a series of 10 imaginary interviews with Winnicott, spanning the scope of his life and work. Kahr is no stranger to Winnicott: he published D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait (1996), as well as edited two anthologies related to Winnicott's ideas and clinical practice (2001, 2002). Kahr has been working on a multi-volume biography of Winnicott - based on his 30-plus years of research and drawing from the extensive interviews and oral histories with over 900 people who knew Winnicott in some capacity, ranging from analysts and patients to even his tailor. With Winnicott's 12-volume Collected Works just published by Oxford University Press (2017), a multi-volume biography of Winnicott would be timely, as the collected works are likely to herald more attention to Britain's first male child psychoanalyst and pioneering object-relations theorist.
If Winnicott is, as Kahr considers him, the ‘cartographer of infancy’, having done more than any other psychoanalyst to map out the developmental processes of childhood, then Kahr in turn is the cartographer of Winnicott - mapping Winnicott's work through his life story and constructing a narrative arc which is thoughtful and engaging. The imaginary interviews which Kahr undertakes are akin to Winnicott's squiggle game, a playful, co-constructed dialogue. Kahr constructs a Winnicott who is both maverick and maestro, while at same time ‘an undistinguished physician’, who struggled at the beginning of his career in medicine to find his place and passion. Kahr also situates Winnicott as a dissenter, using a reference in