D W Winnicott Quotes

It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

The child is alone only in the presence of someone.

Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced

It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.

Nevertheless, with reference to the natural process of childbirth one thing can seldom be forgotten, the fact that the human infant has an absurdly big head.

if we have these personal problems, we must live with them and see how time brings some kind of personal evolution rather than a solution.

The alternative to being is reacting, and reacting interrupts being and annihilates.

It is not possible to be original except on a basis of tradition.

It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found

What is good is always being destroyed

I once said: 'there is no such thing as an infant' meaning, of course, that wherever one finds an infant one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant.

Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of a true self, and the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable.

Now I want to say: 'After being - doing and being done to. But first, being.

At the beginning these two things, the real and the imaginative life, are one and the same thing, because the infant at the beginning does not perceive objectively, but lives in a subjective state, being the creator of all. Gradually, in health the infant becomes able to perceive a world that is a not-me world, and to attain this state the infant must be cared for well enough at the time of absolute dependence.

...there is for many a poverty of play and cultural life because, although the person had a place for erudition, there was a relative failure on the part of those who constitute the child's world of persons to introduce cultural elements at the appropriate phases of the person's personality development.

D. W. Winnicott, un psychanaliste et pédiatre anglais: "Se réfugier dans la normalité, ce n'est pas la santé." (p.96)

In his seminal article, “The Capacity to Be Alone,” psychoanalyst and child development expert D. W. Winnicott asserted that the ability to be alone “is one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development.

Though you work like mad to keep parts of you undiscovered, it is horrible to imagine that you will be completely successful. As the psychologist D.W. Winnicott wrote, "It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.

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.

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 inaction, and able to take credit for success and blame for failure. In one language it can be said that the individual has emerged from dependence to independence, or to autonomy.

In schizoid illness, object-relating goes wrong; the patient relates to a subjective world or fails to relate to any object outside the self. Omnipotence is asserted by means of delusions. The patient is withdrawn, out of contact, bemused, isolated, unreal, deaf, inaccessible, invulnerable, and so on. In health a great deal of life has to do with various kinds of object-relating, and with a ‘to-and-fro’ process between relating to external objects and relating to internal ones. In full fruition this is a matter of interpersonal relationships, but the residues of creative relating are not lost, and this makes every aspect of object-relating exciting.

IN ONE OF his last psychoanalytic papers, D. W. Winnicott wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.

Psychotherapy takes place at the overlap of two areas of playing: that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.

In health, then, children develop enough belief in themselves and in other people to hate external controls of all kinds, controls have changed over into self-control. In self-control the conflict has been worked through within the person in advance. So I see it this way: good condi- tions in the early stages lead to a sense of security, and a sense of security leads on to seIf-control, and when selfcontrol is a fact, then security that is imposed is an insult (36).

Relating to objects can be looked at in the same way as psychosomatic coexistence and the wider issue of integration. Object-relating is something that the maturational process drives the baby to achieve, but cannot happen securely unless the world is presented to the baby well enough. The adapting mother presents the world in such a way that the baby starts with a ration of the experience of omnipotence, this being the proper foundation for his or her later coming to terms with the Reality Principle.

In looking for a vocabulary for this quest for authenticity, I found psychoanalysts more helpful than lawyers. The object-relations theorist D. W. Winnicott makes a distinction between a True Self and a False Self that usefully tracks the distinction between the uncovered and covered selves. The True Self is the self that gives an individual the feeling of being real, which is “more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.” The True Self is associated with human spontaneity and authenticity: “Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.” The False Self, in contrast, gives an individual a sense of being unreal, a sense of futility. It mediates the relationship between the True Self and the world. What I love about Winnicott is that he does not demonize the False Self. To the contrary, Winnicott believes the False Self protects the True Self: “The False Self has one positive and very important function: to hide the True Self, which it does by compliance with environmental demands.” Like a king castling behind a rook in chess, the more valuable but less powerful piece retreats behind the less valuable but more powerful one. Because the relationship between the True Self and the False Self is symbiotic, Winnicott believes both selves will exist even in the healthy individual. Nonetheless, Winnicott defines health according to the degree of ascendancy the True Self gains over the False one. At the negative extreme, the False Self completely obscures the True Self, perhaps even from the individual herself. In a less extreme case, the False Self permits the True Self “a secret life.” The individual approaches health only when the False Self has “as its main concern a search for conditions which will make it possible for the True Self to come into its own.” Finally, in the healthy individual, the False Self is reduced to a “polite and mannered social attitude,” a tool available to the fully realized True Self.

esta elaboración se apoya en la apertura hacia los objetos transicionales, en un principio tan concretos como el chupete y el osito y, con el tiempo, tan abstractos como la amistad, la música, y otros modos en que el individuo recupera la experiencia de ilusión.

Dünya vatandaşları aramaktan vazgeçmeyi öğrenmeli, bağlı oldukları toplumsal birimin, toplumun yerel versiyonunun, milliyetçiliğin ya da dini bir mezhebin sınırlarının dışına taşan çok az insan olduğunu kabul etmeliyiz. Aslında psikiyatrik anlamda sağlıklı insanların sağlıklarını ve kişisel tatminlerini toplumun sınırlı bir alanına (örneğin mahalledeki bilardo kulübüne) bağlı olmalarına borçlu olduklarını kabul etmemiz gerekir. Neden olmasın ki? Gittiğimiz her yerde bir Gilbert Murray bulacağımızı sanıyorsak mutsuz oluruz.

The catastrophe you fear will happen has in fact already happened.

…I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribution to the individual and to society which the ordinary good mother with her husband in support makes at the beginning, and which she does simply through being devoted to her infant.” D.W. Winnicott, (1964) The Child, the Family, and the Outside World

There are good biological reasons for accepting the fact that man is so constituted that he possesses an inner world of the imagination which is different from, though connected to, the world of external reality. It is the discrepancy between the two worlds which motivates creative imagination. People who realize their creative potential are constandy bridging the gap between inner and outer. They invest the external world with meaning because they disown neither the world’s objectivity nor their own subjectivity. This interaction between inner and outer worlds is easily seen when we observe children at play. Children make use of real objects in the external world, but invest these objects with meanings which derive from the world of their own imagination. This process begins very early in the child’s life. Many infants develop intense attachments to particular objects. D. W. Winnicott was the first psychoanalyst to draw attention to the importance of such attachments in his paper ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’.7 These phenomena are closely connected with the beginnings of independence and with the capacity to be alone.

attachment theory, which predicts social competency and the ability to thrive as functions of nurturing early attachments, of bonding; and Erik Erikson, whose work suggests that the violation of the child’s trust leads to a life of increasingly perilous failures of trust; and D. W. Winnicott, the British pediatrician whose writings stress the importance of parental love, the ongoing connection between mother and child. All these authors describe the crucial role of touch, and of the family setting as a place of safety and security.

The child, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott writes, can ‘use doubt about food to hide doubt about love’; doubt about love is doubt about resources.

Analist D. W. Winnicott bir zamanlar kötü annelerle iyi anneler arasındaki farkın *hata yapmak değil, hatalarıyla yaptıkları* olduğuna ilişkin etkili bir gözlemde bulunmuştu.

Our childhood does not have to be perfect for us to be reasonably well-adjusted adults. It just has to be, as D. W. Winnicott said, "good enough." A child has certain core needs for basic safety, connection to others, autonomy, self-esteem, self-expression, and realistic limits. If these are met, then the child will usually thrive psychologically. It is when there are serious shortfalls in meeting a child's needs that problems develop. These shortfalls are what we mean by lifetraps.

The famous British child psychologist D. W. Winnicott called these aspects of personality our True Self and False Self. It is the True Self that lets us know what is authentic and what has become artificial, while the False Self is a diplomat of distrust, enforcing a lifestyle of guardedness, secrecy, and complaint.

There is no original state of chaos. It is a word that implies an idea of order.