Fifty years after “good enough” Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971)

Abstract

He is best known for his studies on children psychological development, but he was an adult psychoanalyst as well. He was the youngest of three children. His mother had a tendency towards depression and this experience had a major influence on Winnicott's work 1 . After serving as a medical officer during World War I, he completed his medical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1922, he became a full member of the Royal College of Physicians and chose pediatrics as his specialty 2 . The interest in psychoanalysis came after reading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. He starts his psychoanalytic training in 1929, having Melanie Klein as a supervisor. But instead of following Kleinian's unconscious fantasies or even Anna Freud's focus on the ego, Winnicott chooses non-alignment with these two groups and becomes part of the Middle Group of the British Psycho-Analytic Institute, a so-called independent branch. John Bowlby, who worked on attachment theory, was also part of this group.Winnicott presented several new concepts on children development, mainly involving the mother-child bond and the environmental influence. He claimed that "the foundations of health are laid down by the ordinary mother in her ordinary loving care of her own baby" 3 , central to which was the mother's attentive holding of her child. Mother, to Winnicott, can be the biological mother, an adoptive mother, as well as the father or any other primary caregiver. By "good enough" mother, Winnicott means a caregiver who recognizes how fragile a baby can be and who is aware of his necessities while meeting only part of them. They fail and, by failing, they allow their baby to find his way of doing things. Also, she allows her baby to be angry, not being mad or moralistic about this behavior.