Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

by D.W. Winnicott

fear of recognizing the fact of dependence.

child tried to remedy the deficiency that she perceived by calling her doll Family.

This includes the tendency towards integration of the personality, towards the wholeness of a personality in body and mind, and towards object-relating, which gradually becomes a matter of interpersonal relationships as the child begins to grow up and understand the existence of other people.

You are nearly all, I expect, engaged in some sort of professionally reliable thing, and in that limited area you behave much better than you do at home, and your clients depend on you and get to lean on you.

To do it later in a child’s life is difficult, but at any rate we may try, as in the provision of residential care.

The difficulty comes from the child’s need to make tests and to see if this preverbal loving, holding, handling, and so on, stands up to the destructiveness that comes with primitive loving. When all goes well, this destructiveness becomes sublimated into things like eating, kicking, playing, competition, and so on.

If you survive, then there is the idea of destruction instead. But first of all there is destruction, and if you start to love a child who was not loved in this preverbal sense, you may find yourself in a mess; you find yourself being stolen from, windows broken, the cat being tortured, and all sorts of frightful things.

the world as a superimposition of a thousand million individual patterns, the one upon the other.

richness of the happiness that builds up in health and does not build up in psychiatric ill health,

A computer cannot be programmed to give motives that are unconscious in the individuals who are the guinea pigs of an investigation. This is where those who have spent their lives doing psychoanalysis must scream out for sanity against the insane belief in surface phenomena that characterizes computerized investigations of human beings.

And if you succeed, you must be prepared to be jealous of your children, who are getting better opportunities for personal development than you had yourselves. You will feel rewarded if one day your daughter asks you to do some babysitting for her, indicating thereby that she thinks you may be able to do this satisfactorily; or if your son wants to be like you in some way, or falls in love with a girl you would have liked yourself, had you been younger. Rewards come indirectly. And of course you know you will not be thanked.

If parent-figures abdicate, then the adolescents must make a jump to a false maturity and lose their greatest asset: freedom to have ideas and to act on impulse.

In human affairs, however, thinking is but a snare and a delusion unless the unconscious is taken into account.

deep and not readily available, and also meaning repressed, or actively kept from availability because of the pain that belongs to its acceptance as part of the self.

It can be said that there are two roads to the truth: the poetic and the scientific.

BLACK come into the material of the analyses that you have been conducting during the past month?

analytic research is the collective experience of analysts.

unconscious motivation is not society’s cup of tea, except when it crystallizes out in some art form.

considerable contribution to the understanding of depressive phenomena waiting to be lifted over from the psychoanalytic to the general psychiatric field.

One reason for this may be that examination of the antisocial child leads to a history of deprivation, and to the child’s reaction to a trauma of a special kind. In this way there is less resistance to research into the dynamics of the antisocial tendency, because what is found is not exactly unconscious motivation.

the Children Act, 1948, which is preventive medicine in respect of delinquency, perhaps the best single thing in the whole vast area that I am examining.

Incidentally, the boy can micturate in a way that girls may envy as much as they envy the boy’s erection. Penis envy is a fact.

Delusion in the girl that a penis exists, and denial of the difference between male and female at the phallic stage; and delusion in the males that the girl has a penis, only just hidden away. This contributes to the appeal of the can-can, strip tease, etc.

woman’s protest against a male society dominated by phallic-phase male swank;

to fully appreciate being a woman one has to be a man, and to fully appreciate being a man one has to be a woman.

Yet people do want to find they have kept up an intimate relationship over a life-time, because there is so much to be gained from the accumulation of shared experiences.

disadvantage they are if they have a relatively unimportant personal inner psychic reality,

It is no good pretending that childbirth carries no risk, and twilight sleep does nothing to the main argument here, which is that there is a danger inherent in the woman’s natural function. Men envy women this danger; moreover, they feel guilty because they cause pregnancies and then sit pretty and watch women going through it all, not only the childbirth, but the whole confinement and

the terribly restricting responsibilities of infant care. So they take risks too, and they will always do so.

Such a lot of our life is frankly boring and ever so simplified, because we forget the unconscious, leave it aside, or only have it on Sunday morning. We work out what is the logical thing, and we have to.

she simply had a limited depth to her personality which she had been struggling with all her life.

But the fact is that your trouble isn’t that you aren’t trying hard, it is that you’re carrying around a damaged brain with you.’

without anybody expecting her to do what she can’t do because it needs a depth of achievement in her personality and in her intellectual capacity which is beyond her.

And this is what she’s like because it’s all exaggerated by the fact that she hasn’t got this depth of inner reality to help her work things out.

‘We went down a lovely little stream and we caught tadpoles.’ Yet from her point of view, not having the Pill and not being allowed the Pill was something she couldn’t deal with. Everything was exaggerated.

She found it difficult to tolerate the tensions that have got to be carried round with us and that make us doubtful about everything and that make us value doubt.

The truth seems to be that we like the idea of freedom and admire those who feel free, but at the same time we are afraid of freedom, and tend at times to be drawn towards being controlled.

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