Author
Donald Winnicott
1 reading card from 1 book · 1964.
1 card
The Child, the Family and the Outside World · 1964
The parent's small failures are not merely tolerable, they are the material from which the child builds patience.
Winnicott was a paediatrician before he was a psychoanalyst and had seen thousands of mothers, which shows in the formulation. His thesis: at the start the infant needs almost total adaptation, because they do not yet have the apparatus to bear waiting. Then, gradually, the parent must fail — be late, not understand at once, be busy — in doses that grow with the child's capacity. These small failures are not merely tolerated, they are necessary: out of them is built the capacity to wait, to self-soothe, to bear frustration. Perfection would block exactly this development, because a child who never meets a lack has nothing from which to build an interior. Hence his related concepts: the holding environment, the arms and the routine that support before the child can support themselves, and the transitional object, the grubby teddy that is both the child's and the world's and which nobody asks to choose between the two.
“The good-enough mother starts with an almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs and, as time proceeds, she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to deal with her failure.”