On the biographer and his business – Robert Rodman in LRB (in 2004):

“Some believe the kind of psychoanalysis he developed – a ‘master-plot of human development’, according to Adam Phillips – is incompatible with Freud’s, and it certainly came to differ critically from that of Melanie Klein, from whom he nevertheless learned a great deal. Indeed Phillips says that his work ‘cannot be understood without reference to Klein. It is a continuous, and sometimes inexplicit, commentary on and critique of her work. The importance of the internal world and its objects, the elaborate and pervasive power of fantasy, the central notion of primitive greed – all these ideas Winnicott takes over from Klein and uses them in his own way.’ But in the end the institutional rigidity of Klein’s system repelled him. As between people enslaved to a doctrine and a method, and people who work things out on their own, Winnicott strongly preferred the latter, and thought the practices of the former likely to inhibit rather than encourage personal development. Like many another genius, he knew how to find – or, as he put it, ‘steal’ – and use what he needed.”

(…)

“The first marriage, which lasted for years, was sexless, either because Winnicott was impotent or because his first wife was averse from sex; or perhaps both. The second, though not restricted in this way, remained childless. These are private matters, but cannot fail to interest a biographer, least of all a biographer as industrious and astute and professionally alert as the generally sympathetic Rodman. So keen is his scent, so candid his interpretations, that it seems odd to find him turning away from consideration of an affair Clare Winnicott may have had when Winnicott felt he had to wait for his father’s death before he could marry her. ‘It is none of our business, anyway,’ Rodman says. Coming from a biographer who sees practically everything else as his business, this is a strange disclaimer.”

(…)

“Winnicott himself attached importance to the fact that his father had so disliked the quasi-sexual excitement experienced by his wife when breast-feeding baby Winnicott that he made her give up the practice. The analyst Marion Milner was one of those who thought that this prohibition had a lifelong effect on the child, in particular during his long struggle to persuade Klein that mothers really matter (objectively, constituting a ‘holding environment’). This effort ‘was the adult equivalent’ of the baby’s ‘struggle to get milk out of his own mother’. His father’s attitude perhaps also contributed to the most celebrated lacuna in Winnicott’s work: until very late in his life he assigned no role whatever to fathers. Rodman naturally has much to say about this partial blindness, or, in a piece of jargon he borrows from Winnicott, this scotoma.”

(…)

“t seems right that the general idea of him is of a doctor who had an extraordinary gift in dealing with children. His account of the mother-child relationship is not as stark as Klein’s, but it stresses the emotion of the mother – he sometimes defines it as hatred and regards it as a feature not only of the mother’s attitude but also of the analyst’s in the counter-transference. It is one of the inevitable difficulties that occur in the process of development. On a superficial view one wouldn’t expect him to confess so readily to the experience of hatred, but despite his gentleness he admitted to having a strong aggressive streak. Rodman quotes some pretty aggressive letters, sometimes addressed to embattled Kleinians, for which he often apologised later. Aggression was part of the psychic given and coexisted with gentleness. It seems he would sometimes physically hold a patient during a session, a practice deplored by colleagues as very bad ‘technique’; his use of it illustrates what he took to be the critical importance of ‘holding’ but also the independence of his thought and practice.”

(…)

“The point here is that in spite of his whimsies and oddities Winnicott’s principal thinking belonged to a world ordinary people could recognise without going into such matters as the Oedipus Complex, or Kleinian bad breasts. Sometimes he is oracular: ‘without the initial good enough environmental provision, the self that can afford to die never develops.’ This is what Rodman calls a ‘typical startling Winnicottian extension of thinking into uncharted territory’. But he uses fairly ordinary language, and though often he makes it sound a bit peculiar it also connects with existential and ethical notions with which the laity can claim some first-hand acquaintance.
He was quite like everybody else, except that he made of himself an environment in which a patient might at last be able ‘to take the risks involved in starting to experience living’. It is also evident that he was capable of extraordinary dedication, and in spite of a long succession of coronaries exhausted himself in his care for patients, especially the regressive and the suicidal.”

Read the article here.

A strange disclaimer, indeed. What’s the biographer’s business exactly, if not also the sex life of his subject?

And Winnicott forgot the father, but that’s fine. He needs to be forgotten.

Aggression of course is part of the ambivalence of love. Especiallly between parents and children.

The self that can afford to die is a bit whimsical, maybe more than bait, but the transitional objects give the laity enough to work with.

The objects are animated. Our fantasies are as strong as reality, often stronger.