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:
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
Writing about Shakespeare · Frank Kermode has his say
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
Here she is · Zadie Smith
‘Disgusting’ · Frank Kermode remembers William Empson
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
Nutmegged · The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis.
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