Quotes About Winnicott

Winnicott once referred to depression as the 'fog over the battlefield'.

On one occasion she (Milner) said to me 'Winnicott really believed, you know, that playing was the only real reality … he thought play, all creativity was sheer magic … that if people can play, anything can happen'. So, I said to her, 'What's wrong with thinking playing is reality, that creativity is magic?' And she said, 'It meant that he believed he could help anyone and everyone, that he was magic because he could play'.

The child, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott writes, can 'use doubt about food to hide doubt about love'; doubt about love is doubt about resources.

This etymology puts me in mind of Winnicott's notion of potential space–that intermediate area between the subjective and objective in which creativity and play occur. Psychotherapy is akin to play, according to Winnicott. Therapy takes place neither inside the mind of the patient nor inside that of the therapist, but in some middle area, in the potential space between them.

Winnicott's understanding of the way experience can become traumatizing is quite different from Freud's. Trauma for Winnicott is not just the introduction of something dramatically negative, frightening, and noxious (e.g., precocious sexual stimulation); it is most fundamentally the failure to sustain something positive—the necessary conditions for healthy psychic development. Thus

I thought of the analyst Winnicott's observation: 'It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found'.

For Winnicott, the "transitional space" between the internal world and "reality" becomes a space for creative play and imagination

Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced [...} It's only lately that I've realized that Winnicott is not suggesting that breakdowns do not recut. Now I see that he may be suggesting just the opposite: that a fear of breakdown in our past may be precisely what causes it to repeat in our future

As Winnicott remarks, social existence, though obviously indispensable for organized human communities, can induce us to regard the world primarily "as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation." For Winnicott, this type of social compliance is a form of psychic illness, which suggests that the vast majority of us are unwell much of the time. As he claims, "social health is mildly depressive— except for holidays.