Clutching at Insanity

Frank Kermode

Winnicott: Life and Work by Robert Rodman
Perseus, 461 pp, US $30.00, May 2003, ISBN 0 7382 0397 1

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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[*] See the LRB of 22 February 2001.

Vol. 26 No. 5 · 4 March 2004 » Frank Kermode » Clutching at Insanity (print version)
pages 12-13 | 3265 words

Letters

From James McCarthy

Frank Kermode draws attention to the professional boundary violations that occurred during Donald Winnicott's analysis of Masud Khan (LRB, 4 March). Winnicott's apparent lack of success in engaging Khan's rage and destructiveness may have been influenced by his denied disillusionment with his own father and his analysts, James Strachey and Joan Riviere. In his biography of Winnicott, Robert Rodman contrasts Winnicott's ruthless independence as a psychoanalytic theorist with his view of the analyst as a 'good enough mother' who allows himself to be used subjectively in order to facilitate growth in the patient. Rodman also refers to Winnicott's stinginess with money in his transactions with Strachey, but the letters that Strachey exchanged with his wife Alix in 1924-25, when she lived in Berlin, suggest routine breaches of confidentiality and sarcastic denigrations of Winnicott as a patient. Khan's private disappointment with Winnicott as an analyst was not echoed by his public idealisation of Winnicott as a theorist and a non-intrusive maternal presence. If Winnicott successfully defended himself against disillusionment with his father as well as his analysts, it might have been difficult for him to confront Khan.

James McCarthy
New York

From Joel Kanter

Frank Kermode notes that Robert Rodman may have overlooked the details of a romantic involvement that Clare, Donald Winnicott's second wife, may have had in the years before they married. A far more important omission, however, is Rodman's neglect of the professional collaboration between Clare and Donald. Clare Britton began her career in social work in 1941 with troubled evacuees in an Oxfordshire hostel. Donald was the consulting physician and Clare was assigned to help the untrained hostel staff make use of this brilliant, eccentric psychoanalyst.

Their collaboration produced two co-authored articles as well as the personal relationship which Rodman describes in considerable detail. Both went on to give testimony to the Curtis Committee, which in turn led to the formation of Children's Services throughout the UK. Until Winnicott's death in 1971, they continued to teach together at the London School of Economics and became the only people awarded honorary membership by the Association of Child Care Officers. Clare, incidentally, underwent a stormy analysis with Melanie Klein.

Undoubtedly, this collaboration had a major impact on Winnicott's work and thinking. After the war, he largely abandoned the practice of child analysis, instead transforming his Oxfordshire experience into a model of therapeutic consultation. He was certainly aware of Clare's creative use of transitional objects (which she simply referred to as 'first treasured possessions') with the evacuated children and he directly acknowledged his debt to her for the term 'holding' which, as Kermode notes, was one of the cornerstones of his theory.

Joel Kanter
Silver Spring, Maryland