Sublime

He can only discover what he feels by seeing it reflected back. If the infant is seen in a way that makes him feel he exists, in a way that confirms him, he is free to go on looking.

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

By their questions and their attention, their careful probing and investigative stealth, the therapist tries – harder than anyone may yet have done – to discover how our presenting problem might be related to the rest of our existence and, in particular, to the turmoils of childhood. Over many sessions, a succession of small discoveries contributes

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

Attachment is built through attunement and caring. In the infant-mother relationship, it is spun largely out of the infant’s needs (expressed in what are called attachment behaviors) and the mother’s responses to these needs. In fact the mother’s responses, their consistency and quality, are the key ingredient.10

Ira Progoff, inventor of the Intensive Journal,