Winnicott Book

Unlike F. Robert Rodman's lengthy and meticulous biography of Winnicott, Phillips simply tries to explicate the essence of Winnicott's delightfully idiosyncratic approach to psychoanalysis. Phillips' book is insightful, although less personal and psychologically compelling. A couple of quotes suggest the Winnicottian insights that Phillips values: "Where Freud and Klein had emphasized the role of disillusionment in human development, in which growing up was a process of mourning, for Winnicott there was a more primary sense in which development was a creative process of collaboration." Also, "Placing himself in the [psychoanalytic] tradition, Winnicott offers us a choice: sanity, a divided self, or the achievement of 'some measure of insanity'....[H]is measure of insanity is, I think, an inspiration."