Sublime

Pretending that the world isn’t cruel, as Bruno Bettelheim argues in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, may be far more damaging for children than showing that it is.

Bettelheim says fairy tales re-create the sort of dramas that lodge in our psyches and offer a way for children to understand that people are rarely all good or all evil, and that they can learn to navigate safely in the world.

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. To help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pre

In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev

It is impossible to maintain a child’s innocence according to a standard of perfect parenting—that is, the parent cannot meet the child’s longing for love, desire for safety, and needs for mirroring at every given moment. The parent, whose soul has been wounded, is bound to fail. From the point of view of the child’s soul, the betrayal is inevitabl