We are born with a brain half-formed – more like a muddy lump of clay than a divine Olympian. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it: ‘There is no such thing as a baby.’ The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with another – we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely our parents. This is frightening, for obvious reasons – who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without us even knowing it.
