Sublime

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

Growing up – and the lesson of the ‘good-enough’ parent – is in part a process of learning that our own desires are not the centre of anyone else’s world. We can be needy and manipulative, bullying or seducing others into pandering to us, but we should expect to be resented for it. Where our behaviour is positive and less self-centred, though,

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’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,

the story shape is structured around how they find, retrieve and finally master the quality in their life that has eluded them.