Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

“The roots of resilience,” the psychologist Diana Fosha writes, “are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.” In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

It also risks reducing care to giving, protecting, and fixing, rather than treating it as a negotiation of needs that involves assuming strength in the other, resisting the temptation to provide all the answers, inevitable failure and disappointment, allowing for the fact that our desires for others may chafe against what those others want for them

A therapeutic attitude taps into a proper recognition of the many contradictions of the mind. It prepares us for the fact that, if we are ever to make a good shared life together with someone, we’ll have no option but to confront and accept—and in the end finally love—the infinitely strange and wondrous complexity of a fellow human.