Sublime

Winnicott would occasionally make psychoanalysis sound curiously like entertainment.

One of the aims of psychoanalysis was to re-establish continuity with whatever constituted the patient’s ‘personal beginning’.

Winnicott had the psychoanalytic virtues of his scientific vices: he did not become systematically coherent at the cost of his own inventiveness.

a typically English attempt to restore a balance.

larger, contemporary fears about just how intractable or manipulable so-called human nature is.

it is the figure of the artist who embodies the drive for authenticity that is for Winnicott exemplary for that integrity of being he values above all else.

So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.

‘On Influencing and Being Influenced’, 1941 34

We see a future of satisfaction in a present of deprivation.