Sublime

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

The twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott observed that children playing within a certain radius of their mothers display higher levels of creativity in their games than those who play farther away.

Just as Bowlby had observed, securely attached infants are distressed when their mother leaves them, but they show delight when she returns, and after a brief check-in for reassurance, they settle down and resume their play.

Teaching delay of gratification shouldn’t begin until after the first year of life, when a foundation of safety has been established between baby and mother. Just as grace always precedes truth (John 1:17), attachment must come before separation.

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, pre

According to Winnicott, the good enough parent does not respond to their child’s each and every need. They do not helicopter-parent, but they do not neglect their child either. Rather, the work of a good enough parent is to create a safe space for their child to develop and unfold on their own.

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 ev