Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

Winnicott places especial emphasis on reliability as a way of protecting the other from unpredictability

A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.

To be capable of a care-cure relationship, with all its requisite predictability, one must therefore be free of mental confusion and balanced enough to show up in a reliable way.

A sign of healthy love, therefore, is the ability to be reliable and responsible with — which is different from being resposible for — the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of the other.