“I now have extensive information about Winnicott’s sexual impotency, his infertility, his unconsummated marriage of twenty-five years to Alice Buxton Taylor Winnicott, the history of Alice Winnicott’s psychiatric illness, as well as confirmation of quite a number of patients who committed suicide during the course of analysis with Winnicott.”
Ethical Dilemmas of the Psycho-Analytical Biographer: The Case of Donald Winnicott
The suicides, okay. I’d like to see a cheat sheet on all patients of the day. Analysis having been the most encumbrous, sickly of beasts. Never go to a psychoanalyst if you need your psyche analyzed.
And infertility, who gives a fart about that. Or for that matter, the ugly word unconsummated. Which suggests that only sexual intercourse completes the act on union. How the hell do you know? How does anybody know?
later—Okay, I’m over it. Coming across this smarm about Winnicott read, you understand, rather like an expose of Santa’s bowel habits. Who needs to know? And is it bad anyway? Are not thinkers of love and mothering human? Would we want them any other way?
I’m tired, tired to death of artificial standards. Of hierarchal thinking. It tells me nothing interesting; it’s a man’s game, infinitely boring. However fair, however earnest the biographer, he doesn’t know it, I assure you, but his subtext sucks.
