Clutching at Insanity 
Frank Kermode
- Winnicott: Life and Work by Robert Rodman
Modern biographers aspire to tell all, and psychoanalysts writing the lives of psychoanalysts should be better at this than most. But there are those who may doubt the propriety of their revelations and investigations. Even when the subject is a fairly ordinary mortal they feel that he or she has a right to some posthumous privacy; and the psychoanalytical profession would presumably claim to be at least as ardently insistent as their orthodox medical colleagues on the preservation of strict confidentiality. But it seems widely accepted that the fame or notoriety of the subject eliminates the need for such discretion.
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Frank Kermode’s most recent book is The Age of Shakespeare. He lives in Cambridge.
Other articles by this contributor:
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
‘Disgusting’ · Frank Kermode remembers William Empson
Our Muddy Vesture · Frank Kermode watches Pacino’s Merchant of Venice
Booker Books · the 1979 prize
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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