Customer Reviews

Winnicott: Life and Work

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The finest book on DWW I have read. It is several books in one: a biography, an intellectual biography, and an account of the goings-on in London's PSa circles, weaving together the personal and the ideas which arose at the time. This book is an excellent elaboration of the earlier bio of DWW by Kahr.

Nathan Szajnberg, MD
Cl. Professor, UCSF
Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis
Member IPSR, UC Berkeley

I have not read Dr. Rodman's previous book on Winnicott's correspondence. However, this book seemed to me like an expansion of it. The effect of this style was to make the narrative choppy and uneven. While there were some tasty passages that inspired me to finish the book, these were too infrequent and distracted from by the over-reliance on quoted correspondence.

Purchased from Amazon, Winnicott: His Life And Work is a wonderful and well written biography. It clearly explains Dr Winnicott's theoretical development, and where and how he disagrees with Freud and Klein, as well as illustrates that Winnicott was a human being with many significant personal problems he struggled with. It also portrays very nicely the politics that went on in London among the Kleinians, Freudians, and Anna Freud during the period. It is well annotated, for example it cites the only available source to find a clear write up of what is was like to be in psychoanalysis with Dr. Winnicott (A biography of Harry Guntrip who was in psychoanalysis with Dr. W.) It made Winnicott and his work come alive for me; and inspired me to return and reread his significant papers with renewed interest, and a better understanding of their utility in a clinical setting.