Dw 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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 The patient is withdrawn, out of contact, bemused, isolated, unreal, deaf, inaccessible, invulnerable, and so on.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.

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.

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.

…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

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

The question I want to begin with is impossibly overdetermined – it is the question of why we are so afraid. The particular answer I will trace out derives from my increasing belief that Gothic literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is more than a phenomenon of Anglo-American life. It is a project. To explain and explore this notion, I want to offer a contribution to one of the longest on-going enterprises in fiction studies – the attempt to define the nature of the Gothic in literature. Nearly two hundred years ago, vexed reviewers struggled to explain the amazing, perverse, inescapable, loathsome, irresistible phenomenon of The Monk, by contrasting the narrative strategies of Matthew Gregory Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. From the controversy over the Monk came the first tools for defining Gothic fiction: the distinction between terror and horror. The inadequacy of these useful terms has driven students of the Gothic for the past two centuries to offer other terms, to devise other distinctions. A distinction common in recent Gothic studies is my starting point. Critics frequently create a binary opposition between inside and outside, between Gothic as an exploration of the unconscious and Gothic as a concern for and even an intervention in social reality. In refusing this bogus binary of Freud versus Marx, I want to define a Gothic praxis that involves – necessarily – the interplay of psychological and social forces. This interplay has determined both the title and the subtitle of my essay. My title, the nurture of the Gothic, plays obviously on the phrase already old by John Ruskin’s time – the nature of the Gothic – because I believe the nature of the Gothic is to nurture. This belief derives from what I take to be a basic fact of communal life: that societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms that can help heal these wounds. Gothic fiction from the later eighteenth century to the present is one such mechanism. Not consciously and yet purposively, Anglo-American culture develops Gothic in order to help heal the damage caused by our embrace of modernity. Thus my title: Gothic’s nature is the psycho-social function of nurture; its project is to heal and transform. To define this healing process, I will begin with the work of a physician, the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott. His notions of potential space, transitional objects and play will help me produce a general definition of Gothic that I can then historicise and contextualise, drawing upon such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Michael Taussig, Ross Chambers, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. This will bring me to the question posed in my subtitle – how can a text be both popular and subversive? Why do we hug closest that which threatens us most? This is another way of asking, how does Gothic nurture? Which is another way of asking, why are we so afraid?