Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

by D.W. Winnicott

The thing I am trying to say is that for the cook the two experiences are different: the slavish one who complies gets nothing from the experience except an increase in the feeling of dependence on authority, while the original one feels more real, and surprises herself (or himself) by what turns up in the mind in the course of the act of cooking.

I think Tim Ferriss' "4 Hour Chef" is a great starting point for cooks to break free from the "dependence on [the] authority" of a recipe.

the child absolutely requires an environment that is indestructible in essential respects:

Parents certainly cannot expect thanks for the fact of a child’s existence. Babies do not ask to be born.

I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribution to the individual and to society that the ordinary good mother with her husband in support makes at the beginning, and which she does simply through being devoted to her infant.

Someone must act for the young mothers who are having their first and second babies, and who are necessarily themselves in a dependent state.

We are believing people because we are started off well by somebody.

‘You sowed a baby and you reaped a bomb.’

It is very difficult for people to recognize that the essential of a democracy really does lie with the ordinary man and woman, and the ordinary, common-place home.

Even if a wise government policy gives parents freedom to run their homes in their own way, it is not certain that officials putting official policies into practice will respect the parents’ position.

Ordinary good parents do need help. They need all that science can offer in respect of physical health and the pre vention and treatment of physical disease; also they want instruction in child care, and help when their children have psychological illnesses or present behaviour problems. But, if they seek such assistance, can they be sure they will not have their responsibil...

In any case, the parents’ attempt to provide a home for their children, in which the children can grow as individuals, and each gradually add a capacity to identify with the parents and then with wider groupings, starts at the beginning, when the mother comes to terms with her infant. Here the father is the protecting agent who frees the mother to devote herself to her baby.

The foundation of the mental health of the individual is laid down at the very beginning when the mother is simply being devoted to her infant, and when the infant is doubly dependent because totally unaware of dependence.

The main activity for promotion of democratic tendency is a negative one: avoidance of interference with the ordinary good home. Study of psychology and education according to what is known provides additional help.

There is special significance in the devotion of the ordinary good mother to her infant, the capacity for eventual emotional maturity being founded as a result of the devotion. Mass interference at this point, in a society, would quickly and effectually lessen the democratic potential of that society, just as it would diminish the richness of its culture.