{"id":8506,"date":"2024-08-21T17:44:11","date_gmt":"2024-08-21T21:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/winnicott-on-the-qualities-of-a-healthy-mind-and-a-healthy-relationship-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-08-21T17:44:11","modified_gmt":"2024-08-21T21:44:11","slug":"winnicott-on-the-qualities-of-a-healthy-mind-and-a-healthy-relationship-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/winnicott-on-the-qualities-of-a-healthy-mind-and-a-healthy-relationship-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Winnicott<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,\u201d James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest essays<\/a>. \u201cI am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.\u201d <\/p>\n

It is a powerful sentiment and a dangerous one, because if mutual salvation is not the byproduct of a healthy relationship but an expectation upon entering into one, it can bleed into destructive codependence. And yet we know from the neurobiology of limbic revision<\/a> that \u201cwho we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether a relationship ends up rewiring or deepening unhealthy attachment patterns encoded early in life depends largely on the expectations we bring to it, and can change from one to the other as the expectations change. When we approach one another with curiosity and care without the expectation of curing each other, something paradoxical and miraculous may happen \u2014 the care may become the cure. The Latin of the word \u201ccure\u201d \u2014 c\u016bra<\/em> \u2014 means anxiety, which is also the root of \u201ccare\u201d (to have cares, to be anxious), \u201ccuriosity\u201d (an anxious inquisitiveness), and \u201csecure\u201d (without anxiety and care). <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The pioneering pediatrician turned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott<\/a> (April 7, 1896\u2013January 28, 1971) understood uniquely the interplay of the two in the making of secure and healthy relationships. Trained as a physician \u2014 a profession predicated on cures \u2014 Winnicott came to psychoanalsis skeptical of applying the disease model of medicine to the health of the psyche. For him, proper therapy offered not just a cure of symptoms but \u201ca more widely based personality richer in feeling and more tolerant of others because more sure of [oneself]\u201d \u2014 a radically countercultural notion amid a therapy culture predicated on curing pathologies. <\/p>\n

Winnicott placed at the center of a healthy and secure relationship \u2014 between a therapist and a patient, as much as between two private human beings \u2014 what he termed care-cure<\/em>. In the final months of his life, he developed this notion in a talk delivered to doctors and nurses in St. Luke\u2019s Church, later included in the altogether fantastic posthumous collection Home Is Where We Start from: Essays by a Psychoanalyst<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). <\/p>\n

With an eye to what is at the heart of this care-cure<\/em> concept, Winnicott observes:<\/p>\n

\n

We are talking about love, but\u2026 the meaning of the word must be spelt out.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
One of artist Margaret C. Cook\u2019s rare 1913 illustrations<\/a> for Walt Whitman\u2019s Leaves of Grass<\/em>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In spelling out the primary qualities of a true care-cure relationship \u2014 it must be non-moralistic, truthful, and reliable \u2014 Winnicott places especial emphasis on reliability as a way of protecting the other from unpredictability, since the root of suffering for many is that \u201cthey have been subjected as part of the pattern of their lives to the unpredictable.\u201d (All trust is, in a sense, a handshake of predictability, and every breach of trust is devastating precisely because the other person has unpredictably withdrawn their hand.) <\/p>\n

Winnicott considers the cost of unpredictability: <\/p>\n

\n

Behind unpredictability lies mental confusion, and behind that there can be found chaos in terms of somatic functioning, i.e. unthinkable anxiety that is physical.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To be capable of a care-cure relationship, with all its requisite predictability, one must therefore be free of mental confusion and balanced enough to show up in a reliable way. Winnicott offers a definition of a healthy mind that doubles as a fundamental definition of healthy love:<\/p>\n

\n

A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from Birds by Brian Wildsmith<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This imaginative interpenetration of experience is necessary for the greatest challenge of consciousness \u2014 understanding what it is like to be another. Without it, there can be no love, for we cannot love whom we do not understand \u2014 then we are pseudo-loving a projection. A sign of healthy love, therefore, is the ability to be reliable and responsible with \u2014 which is different from being resposible for \u2014 the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of the other. <\/p>\n

Complement with Alain de Botton, writing a generation after Winnicott, on the qualities of a healthy mind<\/a> and Adrienen Rich, writing in Winnicott\u2019s day, on the mark of an honorable human relationship<\/a>, then revisit Winnicott on motherhood<\/a>, that fundament of our hardest-wired attachment patterns. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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