Home Is Where We Start from: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

It's unusual for find a psychotherapist with a Freudian approach arguing that men's envy of women may be as strong as women's phallic envy. But Winnicott, who died in 1971, was no ordinary therapist. An original, idiosyncratic, occasionally crotchety writer and lecturer, the British psychoanalyst, we learn here, speculated freely and sometimes prophetically on teenage conflicts and suicide, people who erect a ""false self,'' birth control, feminism, the Berlin wall and the family's changing role. In these essays and talks, he views adolescence as a life-or-death struggle for maturity, discusses the positive value of depression as a means of coping, explores creative ways to teach mathematics, and argues that men are risk-takers because they are denied the experience of childbirth. The essays are marked by earnestness, colloquial informality and shrewd insights into personal and social ills that afflict us today. January 27