along the lines of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s suggestion that if we want to understand a person and their symptoms we need to see what kind of environment they create for themselves, what sort of world they make (a so-called symptom, for example, might be like a rule other people have to abide by, a love-test or a conversation-stopper). What Winnicott means by the ‘environment’ a person creates around them is what people call up in other people, what versions of other people they induce or preclude, through their symptoms, through the ways they make a nuisance of themselves.
