D.W. Winnicott > Quotes

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“We are poor indeed if we are only sane.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“What is a normal child like? Does he just eat and grow and smile sweetly? No, that is not what he is like. The normal child, if he has confidence in mother and father, pulls out all the stops. In the course of time, he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle, and to appropriate . . . At the start he absolutely needs to live in a circle of love and strength (with consequent tolerance) if he is not to be too fearful of his own thoughts and of his imaginings to make progress in his emotional development.”
― Donald W. Winnicott

“The most aggressive and therefore the most dangerous words in the languages of the world are to be found in the assertion I AM.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start from

“Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced”
― D.W. Winnicott

“The child is alone only in the presence of someone.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“Nevertheless, with reference to the natural process of childbirth one thing can seldom be forgotten, the fact that the human infant has an absurdly big head.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“if we have these personal problems, we must live with them and see how time brings some kind of personal evolution rather than a solution.”
― D. W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

“The alternative to being is reacting, and reacting interrupts being and annihilates.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“It is not possible to be original except on a basis of tradition.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found”
― D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“I once said: 'there is no such thing as an infant' meaning, of course, that wherever one finds an infant one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant.”
― D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

“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 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. In one language it can be said that the individual has emerged from dependence to independence, or to autonomy.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

“What is good is always being destroyed”
― D.W. Winnicott

“Now I want to say: 'After being - doing and being done to. But first, being.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“At the beginning these two things, the real and the imaginative life, are one and the same thing, because the infant at the beginning does not perceive objectively, but lives in a subjective state, being the creator of all. Gradually, in health the infant becomes able to perceive a world that is a not-me world, and to attain this state the infant must be cared for well enough at the time of absolute dependence.”
― D. W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

“Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of a true self, and the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable.”
― D.W. Winnicott

“In schizoid illness, object-relating goes wrong; the patient relates to a subjective world or fails to relate to any object outside the self. Omnipotence is asserted by means of delusions. The patient is withdrawn, out of contact, bemused, isolated, unreal, deaf, inaccessible, invulnerable, and so on. In health a great deal of life has to do with various kinds of object-relating, and with a ‘to-and-fro’ process between relating to external objects and relating to internal ones. In full fruition this is a matter of interpersonal relationships, but the residues of creative relating are not lost, and this makes every aspect of object-relating exciting.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

“The mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother's face and finds himself therein...provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother's face, but rather the mother's own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“...there is for many a poverty of play and cultural life because, although the person had a place for erudition, there was a relative failure on the part of those who constitute the child's world of persons to introduce cultural elements at the appropriate phases of the person's personality development.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“Psychotherapy takes place at the overlap of two areas of playing: that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality

“In health, then, children develop enough belief in themselves and in
other people to hate external controls of all kinds, controls have changed
over into self-control. In self-control the conflict has been worked
through within the person in advance. So I see it this way: good condi-
tions in the early stages lead to a sense of security, and a sense of security
leads on to seIf-control, and when selfcontrol is a fact, then security that
is imposed is an insult (36).”
― D.W. Winnicott

“an environment that holds the baby well enough, the baby is able to make personal development according to the inherited tendencies. The result is a continuity of existence that becomes a sense of existing, a sense of self, and eventually results in autonomy.”
― D. W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

“The most aggressive and therefore the most dangerous words in the languages of the world are to be found in the assertion I AM. It has to be admitted, however, that only those who have reached a stage at which they can make this assertion are really qualified as adult members of society.”
― Donald Winnicott

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide”
― Donald Winnicott

“It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.”
― Donald W. Winnicott