A Note on Four Psychoanalytical Biographies

I have been a tireless reader of biographies at least as far back as the seventh grade. Since the summer began, I've had a chance to read four biographical studies, none exhaustive, and each in most cases covering terrain I was at least moderately familiar with. But they were enjoyable nonetheless, each in their own way, and each also filled in some gaps in a welcome way, so I thought I'd offer a few notes on each in case others might wonder about the wisdom of picking any of these up.

I begin with Joel Kanter, ed., Face to Face with Children: The Life and Work of Clare Winnicott. I should confess two biases at the outset: first, anything with the word "Winnicott" in the title is invariably going to attract my attention. Second, Joel Kanter is one of the conveners of an international study group on psychosis that it has been my very great privilege and delight to be part of.

That said, this book fills a huge lacuna. Clare Winnicott's husband Donald Woods is of course world renowned. But her own life as a clinical social worker and writer has been largely left in his shadow, which is completely unjustifiable given the scope of her contributions in their own right--to say nothing of the huge and countless ways she helped her husband achieve so much. 

Kanter has assembled a worthy cast of people to write about her works, and has reprinted several of them which were originally published decades ago in obscure places. But the crowning glory of this book is the 90-page biography he writes at the outset, which is superb. Buy and read the book if only for that reason. 

I have been very interested in reading more of Sandor Ferenczi for some time, and recently stumbled across Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention by Martin Stanton. It is a unique book: in fact I would call it a prolegomenon to a proper scholarly biography. That diminishes Stanton's labours not a whit, and in fact he himself more than once says he is merely trying to lay out the parameters of what a full biography of Ferenczi needs to wrestle with. 

There are at least two significant gifts offered by this book. First, Stanton has performed a very great task by merely assembling a chronology of the Hungarian analyst's life, farcing into each entry not just significant events in Ferenczi's own life, but also significant developments in the wider psychoanalytical movement in the opening decades of the last century. Thus we see when and where Freud and Ferenczi first meet, and Jung and Ferenczi, and so on.

Second, he has put together thematically named chapters that introduce the reader to some of the concepts and practices unique to Ferenczi, with liberal quotations of his writings as well as reactions, where known, to his writings from Freud and Jones, Jung and Klein, and others.

Next up is Gérard Bléandonu's Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works. It is an odd book in some ways, starting with the fact that a French psychiatrist wrote the first biography of an English psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, which was then translated from French. As someone who, many years ago, worked in scholarly translation of works between French and English (dealing, at the time, with Canadian governmental policy on HIV/AIDS), I know what a vastly time-consuming and painstaking process it is. I also learned that it's generally inadvisable to translate from translations. 

Nevertheless, in a way not entirely dissimilar to the Ferenczi study noted above, Gérard Bléandonu has written a life that spends most of its time discussing Bion's texts. I would have welcomed more integration of the theoretical chapters with Bion's life, which seems very much confined to the introduction to the book. By the end of the book one does not feel that one has penetrated very far at all beneath the surface of Bion's life, which is perhaps how he wanted it. 

So I would not consider this the definitive study of Bion by any means, and once again wonder: is anyone working on such a biography? If I had time and money I'd gladly fly to England (and anywhere else!) to luxuriate in archives and private collections of letters and whatever else I could lay my hands on in order to write about Bion. (For some unanalyzed reason, I have long wanted to write a biography. I thought at one time I might do the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, but a new study of his life has just been published--once more first in French!) 

Finally we come to Brett Kahr, The Legacy of Winnicott: Essays on Infant and Child Mental Health. I picked this up not only because I respect Kahr and have enjoyed previous works of his, but for two other reasons at least: the inclusion of an interview with Winnicott conducted by no less a figure than Paul Roazen; and then a really compelling essay by Susie Orbach, "The False Self and the False Body." 

If you do not know Roazen's work, then you should. He bids fair, more than a decade after his death, to retain (to my mind at least) the post of doyen of historiographers of psychoanalysis, at least in the anglophone world. Several of his books have been utterly fascinating, not least his Freud and His Followers as well as Meeting Freud's Family. 

It was Roazen, if I recall correctly, who back in the 1960s discovered and published the then hugely scandalous fact that Freud had analyzed his own daughter Anna, which by that point almost everyone was at pains to conceal, not least since she didn't die until 1982. On the topic of Anna, I've read two biographies: the one by Robert Coles (which is workmanlike but all of his biographies tend to feel just a shade too beige in some ways) and the more comprehensive one by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, in an updated second edition from 2008.

I have known of Orbach's work for a while, but not read much. Still her essay in this collection is extremely valuable for its steely eyed critique of Winnicott's ideas of the true and false self. Orbach argues that too much of the reception and use of these ideas by and after Winnicott posit some kind of chasm (bad!) between them, on the one hand, or some kind of magical integration on the other (good!). But, she argues convincingly, we cannot and must not allow them to be seen as thus divided because in reality aspects of the true and false selves are always mixed up with each other. The therapeutic task thus becomes not a perfectionistic one (how very unWinnicottian!) whereby we totally separate or totally integrate the two, but rather an asking of the question: how ought they to be together, and what can be realistically disentangled and perhaps changed, and what cannot? 

In sum, each of these books was interesting, though none, admittedly, was as moving and fascinating as the last major biography I read, Gail Hornstein's lovely study of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (about which a few brief comments here though I really should go back and write more about her). 

Next up: I will likely shift away from psychoanalytical biographies for a bit as I've just ordered Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. I was tempted to do so after this highly entertaining (can one say that?) interview with the author here.