D.W. Winnicott QUOTES

1 " Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide. "

2 " We are poor indeed if we are only sane. "

― D.W. Winnicott

3 " ...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

4 " It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found. "

― D.W. Winnicott

5 " The alternative to being is reacting, and reacting interrupts being and annihilates. "

― D.W. Winnicott

6 " Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you. "

― D.W. Winnicott

7 " 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. "

― D.W. Winnicott , Playing and Reality

8 " 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. "

― D.W. Winnicott

9 " The most aggressive and therefore the most dangerous words in the languages of the world are to be found in the assertion I AM. "

― D.W. Winnicott , Home Is Where We Start from

10 " The child is alone only in the presence of someone. "

― D.W. Winnicott , Playing and Reality

11 " Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced "

― D.W. Winnicott

12 " 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

13 " It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found. "

― D.W. Winnicott

14 " 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

15 " It is not possible to be original except on a basis of tradition. "

― D.W. Winnicott , Playing and Reality

16 " What is good is always being destroyed "

― D.W. Winnicott

17 " 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

18 " Now I want to say: 'After being - doing and being done to. But first, being. "

― D.W. Winnicott , Playing and Reality

19 " It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found "

― D.W. Winnicott , Playing and Reality

20 " 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

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