I didn’t find D.W. Winnicott by myself. I probably wouldn’t have tracked him down had not both Phillips and De Botton profusely praised him. And it’s all become a small circle after reading M.M., who had worked closely (to say the least) with him back in the days.

As gifted and creative as he was in his analysis, Winnicott fails to register as a superb writer (at least for me). Phillips’s biography on him read much more pleasurable than his own writings did, on many occasions. He left my palette a bit brownish and dry, a stark contrast with Phillips’ work.

The most interesting piece in the collection is “The Concept of a Healthy Individual”. Here, Winnicott’s clarity comes to the full as he categorically rejecting the idea of health as a simple absence of psycho-neurotic disorder. The life of a healthy individual is characterized by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations, as much as by the positive features. The main thing is that you feel real and have a sense of self and being. There can be no do before be. “The man or woman feels he or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inaction, and able to take credit for success and blame for failure”.

A healthy individual, has a strong sense of aliveness and cuts a good balance between personal idiosyncrasies and external demands (accept the Reality Principle without too much loss of personal impulse). Why balance is needed? Because there is a deterministic basis to life and we’re all subject to our genetic and early-life environmental realities.

Here, luck from your early-life environmental provision plays a key role (whether you’re fortunate to have “a good-enough facilitating environment”). It’s at the early stages of one’s own personal emotional development that the basis of one’s own capacity is being laid down. Your relational (love) template is cemented early on. (The biggest catastrophe has already happened! Alas, what a comforting thought…)

The dynamic of the growth process is, from “nearly absolute dependence” to “independence which does not become absolute”. Autonomy, essentially.  “The central feature in human development is the arrival and secure maintenance of the stage of I AM”.

Another thesis in the collection that resonates is, everyone can live creatively (you don’t have to be an artist). There is nothing that has to be done that cannot be done creatively.  This involves retaining something personal, perhaps secret, that is unmistakably yourself. (Like this blog). “If nothing else, try breathing, something no one can do for you.”

Winnicott offers the best argument against perfectionism — which is pathological by nature — with his “good-enough” concept. That’s his primary contribution to psychoanalysis. “Perfection belongs to machines, and the imperfections that are characteristic of human adaption to needs are an essential quality in the environment that facilitates”.

“If one has been happy, one can bear distress.”