Clutching at Insanity 
Frank Kermode
- Winnicott: Life and Work by Robert Rodman
Modern biographers aspire to tell all, and psychoanalysts writing the lives of psychoanalysts should be better at this than most. But there are those who may doubt the propriety of their revelations and investigations. Even when the subject is a fairly ordinary mortal they feel that he or she has a right to some posthumous privacy; and the psychoanalytical profession would presumably claim to be at least as ardently insistent as their orthodox medical colleagues on the preservation of strict confidentiality. But it seems widely accepted that the fame or notoriety of the subject eliminates the need for such discretion.
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Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
Here she is · Zadie Smith
Our Muddy Vesture · Frank Kermode watches Pacino’s Merchant of Venice
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
First Pitch · Marianne Moore
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
At Tate Britain · William Blake
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