Sublime

She thought of him as a source of knowledge rather than experience; a good, though not contemporary mind, a person rather than a man.

All learn from their dark shadows.

Owning How You Shape Your Partner’s Feelings.

Openness to new experience and flexibility of belief

From the very beginning Winnicott would represent himself as less knowing than Klein as an analyst; and he would stress the importance, as an analyst, of being able to tolerate not-knowing.

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.

their wants are desires they mistakenly believe will make them complete and calm the conflict within.

Think back to your childhood: were you made to feel “bad” or in the wrong, or even responsible for your parents’ bad moods? If it happened to you, it is all too easy to try to repair your feeling of being wrong by making someone else feel wrong, and the victims of this are, far too often, our children.

He was beginning to define, in his earliest work, a new kind of competence in which treatment was the provision of an opportunity for the patient, an opportunity to make himself known.