In Winnicott's Words
Published on 11.27.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com
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Image from Non-Compliance in Winnicott’s Words, by Alexander Newman
This week I offer a few longer quotations from Winnicott’s writings about parenting—that is, about how to raise a free, autonomous, creative human being. There’s no special principle of selection. These happened to catch my eye as I was reading; I hope they catch yours too.
Don’t let Winnicott’s simple direct prose fool you (as it once fooled me): He’s a deep thinker about parenting, and about the human condition. Winnicott writes with great humanity about the “immense contribution” that good-enough parents make to the world. His thinking influenced Alice Miller’s classic, Drama of the Gifted Child, a book that was important to me years ago, when I was first considering therapy. A main theme of that book is the importance of children being seen and taken seriously for who they are. This is precisely what good-enough parents do.
If you’re not familiar with Winnicott’s work, his book Home Is Where We Start From offers a good collection of essays and lectures on a range of themes. If you want to jump straight into the deep end, read Playing and Reality.
For an amusing preface, here’s Winnicott relating a definition of insanity that aligns with his relational perspective: “As a friend of mine (the late John Rickman) said, ‘insanity is not being able to find anyone to stand you.’” (Home Is Where We Start From)
More of Winnicott’s Words…
The life of a healthy individual is characterized by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations, as much as by the positive features. The main thing is that the man or woman feels he or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inactions, and able to take credit for successes and blame for failure. (Home Is Where We Start From)
I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.” (Winnicott On the Child)
In a complex way, development, especially at the beginning, depends on a good-enough environmental provision. A good-enough environment can be said to be that which facilitates the various individual inherited tendencies so that development takes place according to these inherited tendencies….a good-enough environment starts with a high degree of adaptation to individual infant needs. Usually the mother is able to provide this because of the special state she is in, which I have called primary maternal preoccupation….Adaptation decreases according to the baby’s growing need to experience reactions to frustration. In health the mother is able to delay her function of failing to adapt, till the baby has become able to react with anger rather than be traumatized by her failures. (Home Is Where We Start From)
Holding….gradually widens in scope to mean the whole of the adaptive care of the infant….Holding can be done well by someone who has no intellectual knowledge of what is going on in the individual; what is needed is a capacity to identify, to know what the baby is feeling like. In an environment that holds the baby well enough, the baby is able to make personal development according to the inherited tendencies.The result is a continuity of existence that becomes a sense of existing, a sense of self, and eventually results in autonomy. (Home Is Where We Start From)
If we take the situation in which she is a child playing while her mother is occupied with some activity such as sewing, then this is the good patterning in which growth is taking place. At any moment the child may make a gesture and the mother will transfer her interest from her sewing to the child. If the mother is preoccupied and does not at first notice the child’s need, the child has only to begin to cry and the mother is available. In the bad pattern, which is at the root of this patient’s illness, the child cried and the mother did not appear. In other words, the scream that she is looking for is the last scream just before hope was abandoned. Since then screaming has been of no use because it fails in its purpose. (Psychoanalytic Explorations)
For me, a good-enough mother and good-enough parents and a good-enough home do in fact give most babies and small children the experience of not having ever been significantly let down. In this way average children have the chance to build up a capacity to believe in themselves and the world—they build a structure on the accumulating of introjected reliability. They are blissfully unaware of their good fortune, and find it difficult to understand those of their companions who carry around with them for life experiences of unthinkable anxiety, and a deficit in the department of introjected reliability. (Psychoanalytic Explorations)
I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribution to the individual and to society that the ordinary good mother with her husband in support makes at the beginning, and which she does simply through being devoted to her infant. (Home Is Where We Start From)