Sublime

Winnicott is attentive to the kind of environment the child creates for himself, how he discovers and uses what he finds, as the essential indicator of emotional development.

Winnicott places especial emphasis on reliability as a way of protecting the other from unpredictability

Where Freud and Klein had emphasized the role of disillusionment in human development, in which growing up was a process of mourning, for Winnicott there was a more primary sense in which development was a creative process of collaboration.

Winnicott assumed that the child had a primary wish to be understood, indeed ‘longs for someone to bring understanding’.32 He does not begin with the conventional psychoanalytic conviction that the child is self-evasive. The Winnicottian child tends to be a collaborator rather than an antagonist, so Winnicott’s early papers present a less imposing

For Winnicott the patient is not intrinsically unacceptable to himself, but he can only come to himself in his own time. As Winnicott remarks, he cannot force the spatula into the child’s mouth.

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

The creative originality that Winnicott considered to be an innate characteristic of infancy, realized through maternal care, could be muffled or felt to be lost.

through his use of an albeit idiosyncratic ordinary language, Winnicott made the theory of psychoanalysis more accessible to people it was originally intended to help.

Winnicott is close to saying here that there is an innate agonistic tendency in the developing infant.