Bob was... Bob’s idol was Winnicott, Donald Winnicott, the great analyst in England, and Winnicott was much more than an analyst and was really much more human than most analysts. It was Winnicott who used phrases like 'a good enough mother'. It was Winnicott who was the first analyst, really, the first psychiatrist to pay attention to play. Freud had never really written about play, or transitional objects. Bob had met Winnicott several times, and after Winnicott’s death, he was to become Winnicott’s biographer. And he did finally, after many years’ work, probably 15 years, he put together a magnificent volume, a magnificent biography of Winnicott, but those 15 years, I think, were subtracted from what he might have been writing himself. He was a very, very good clinician and he wrote very beautifully of his patients. Some of his clinical writing was published, but not enough. I speak in the past tense because Bob died, in a way which shouldn’t have happened a few years ago. And when he died, he left a treasure of assorted manuscripts. One book was published posthumously, but... but the rest is, I fear, maybe in limbo. And the business of having a voice and having some effect, it... which matters intensely to me, and it mattered no less to Bob. And it doesn’t just matter to me, you know, in a sort of narcissistic way; I like to think when I am gone, I will have said some interesting things about other lives and other people. And... and Bob Rodman certainly felt the same thing. And... I’m not giving an adequate picture of his life. He remarried, there were many children, and sometimes I would join the family, almost as an honorary member. There was one such time in Hawaii. I was very close to Bob and his second wife and all the children, one calls them children. The youngest one is a godson of mine, and Nick was only 16 or 17 when he heard an awful noise one night, rushed into his parents’ bedroom and saw his father convulsing and then falling on the floor with a... what proved to be a catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage. A cerebral haemorrhage which happened, I think, because the anticoagulants he was taking after some heart surgery were not properly monitored. I’ve had a horror of anticoagulants since that time, and if I go on anticoagulants, I have my blood tested every... every five minutes.
