The Interviews with Icons

In this new series of “posthumous interviews” famous psychoanalysts are resurrected from the dead and are invited for a frank and detailed conversation about their lives and their work.

Donald Winnicott returns to his consulting room in London’s Chester Square to reminisce about his childhood, his training, his work at Paddington Green Children’s Hospital, his technical experiments with patients, and even the morning of his death and, also, provides readers with a comprehensive survey of his many contributions to developmental psychology and to clinical practice.

Sigmund Freud pays another visit to Vienna’s renowned Café Landtmann, where he had often enjoyed reading newspapers and sipping coffee. Freud explains how he came to invent psychoanalysis, speaks bluntly about his feelings of betrayal by Carl Gustav Jung, recounts his flight from the Nazis, and so much more, all the while explaining his theories of symptom formation and psychosexuality.

John Bowlby takes us on a grouse-shooting expedition – his favourite weekend passion – through the English countryside, while lambasting his colleagues for their failures to understand the true origins of mental illness.

Melanie Klein teaches us some of her favourite kitchen recipes while discussing the art of talking with patients.

These posthumous interviews – beautifully written, concisely composed, steeped in historical rigour, and full of hitherto unpublished archival gems – will provide students and qualified professionals alike with a master class in psychological theory and practice, comfortably contained within one portable, affordable, and lavishly illustrated volume.