The psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott has written that ‘there is no such thing as a baby. There is only a baby and someone.’ The writer Leah Libresco Sargeant expands the point: The liberal theory of the independent individual as the basic unit of society is full of exceptions … It would be fairer to say that dependence is our default state, and self-sufficiency the aberration. Our lives begin and (frequently) end in states of near total dependence, and much of the middle is marked by periods of need.36
