Sublime

When children are born to people who do not have the capacity to meet their needs consistently, those people often blame the children for having those needs. Children are easily confused about their needs and whose responsibility it is to meet them. When children grow into adults and have not had enough corrective experiences of getting their needs

Winnicott implies here that it is not the interpretation in itself that matters but the patient’s use of the interpretation. What he makes of what he’s given – the ‘glittering object’ – is more significant than the given thing.

I try to be guided by Carl Whitaker’s advice to feed the patient not when he is crying that he is hungry, but only when I feel the milk overflowing from my own nipples.

The mother makes what is in fact a dialogue between her and her infant appear to him as a monologue born of his desire. By virtue of the mother’s adaptation, as we have seen, there is an area of illusion; it is as though, from the infant’s point of view, he creates in fantasy the mother he needs and finds. The infant, in Winnicott’s account, discov

Bowlby himself told me that just such boarding-school experiences probably inspired George Orwell’s novel 1984, which brilliantly expresses how human beings may be induced to sacrifice everything they hold dear and true—including their sense of self—for the sake of being loved and approved of by someone in a position of authority.

In the overlap between people’s boundaries there is potential for interesting meetings and the potential for collapses.

As he got older he developed his own ideas in virtual disregard of the traditional languages of psychoanalysis.

the developmental necessity of an acknowledged and perhaps innate non-compliance in the child that is bound up with aggression, but the aggression that is integral to the drive for personal development. It was to be the relationship between the infant’s primitive, ruthless love – the greed that Winnicott called ‘mouth love’ – and the infant’s poten

In 1944, Bowlby published the very first paper on family therapy, Forty-four Juvenile Thieves, in which he noted that “behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.” Bowlby’s young charges were frozen in the attitude “I will never be hurt again” and paralyzed in desperation and rage.