Winnicott: Life and Work

This beautifully written and long-awaited biography is the first full-scale life of the great British psychoanalyst, a major figure both in psychiatry and as a principle influence on the leading child development experts of our time, including Brazelton, Spock, and Stanley Greenspan.A pediatrician turned analyst, D. W. Winnicott rose to prominence in the stormy days when the followers of Anna Freud were battling those of Melanie Klein for the right to be called Freud's true intellectual heirs. This rich, witty, and insightful story probes the autobiographical sources of Winnicott's influential concepts, such as the "holding environment" so crucial to psychotherapy and the "transitional object" known to every parent as the "security blanket." Winnicott's astonishing career involves many of the great figures in psychoanalysis and psychology, not just Klein and Anna Freud but the whole eccentric Bloomsbury scene including the Stracheys, R. D. Laing, and the controversial Pakistani prince and analyst Masud Khan.Readers of Oliver Sacks, Janet Malcolm, and Peter Gay, as well as anyone interested in the great explorers of human nature, will find this book passionately absorbing.