Sublime

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

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

Winnicott would never insist on Klein’s equation of development and the acquisition of knowledge. And in his later work he would replace the capacity to know by the capacity to play, as a criterion for health. In Winnicott’s work it would sometimes seem as though for him the (perhaps unconscious) aim of any method, or set of rules, was to make poss

The twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott observed that children playing within a certain radius of their mothers display higher levels of creativity in their games than those who play farther away.

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