• for: Donald Winnicott, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, Deep Humanity, DH

• title: For Donald Winnicott, the psyche is not inside us but between us

• author: James Barnes date: May 18, 2020

• comment: insight

  • adjacency
    • between
      • Donald Winnicott
      • Deep Humanity concept of human INTERbeCOMing
    • adjacency relationship
      • when James Barnes wrote that Winnicott's psychoanalysis is based on a unitary conception of self and other,
        • that resonated deeply with me
        • due to my own spiritual journey in
          • non-duality as well as
          • Deep Humanity conception of human INTERbeCOMing
• source: early morning discussions
  • this morning, after deep discussion, my partner posted a picture of Donald Winnicott on my WhatsApp and I googled Donald Winnicott and found, read and resonated deeply with this article:
    • https://psyche.co/ideas/for-donald-winnicott-the-psyche-is-not-inside-us-but-between-us

• for: Winnicott, Freud, comparison, comparison - Winnicott - Freud, transitional space, Bardo, evolution
• paraphrase

• comparison: Winnicott, Freud

  • Winnicott had a strikingly different notion of the agent of psychological change than Freud.

    • Winnicott
      • His psychotherapeutic model was developmental, one that sees.
        • the therapeutic relationship and
        • the original parent-child relationship(s)
      • as analogous.
      • Thus, just as he saw the development of the child as being fundamentally tied
        • to the immediate, visceral relationship with the mother in the experiential unit.

    • psychotherapeutic change was all about the relationship between - client and - therapist.

      • This was later conceptualised as a shift
        • from a ‘one-person’ psychology
        • to a ‘two-person’ psychology.

    • Freud

      • Freud was focused on rational interventions from the outside
      • This gave way in Winnicott to a co-creative journey occurring in the area in between,
    • which was much more about who one was and what one did, than what one thought or said.
      • In his book Playing and Reality (1971),
    • Winnicott called the location of this experience ‘transitional space’,
      • alluding to its dynamic, insubstantial quality,
      • but also to its nature as a place of becoming.
    • It is, he said, a place we both
      • create and that
      • creates us
    • a paradox that we must accept and not try to resolve
    • where unformulated possibility replaces
      • fixed identities, and
      • experience is necessarily co-constructed.

• comment

  • Winnicott's transitional space is like
    • the Tibetan concept of the Bardo
    • the biological concept of evolution

• for: psychopathology, psychopathology - Winnicott, comparison - Winnicott - Freud
• paraphrase
• comparison: Winnicott, Freud
  • Winnicott’s concept of psychopathology was very different from Freud’s.
    • Freud
      • Freud understood psychopathology in terms of conflicts between:
        • the internal drives and
        • the external demands of the world
      • that what goes wrong is something internal to the person
        • only triggered by the outside world.
      • This basic idea is still very much alive in reductive psychiatric thinking and CBT, which, following the common dualistic model,
        • also locate the problem inside the mind/brain.
    • Winnicott
      • By contrast, Winnicott understood psychopathology primarily in terms of trauma or deficit in the relational domain,
      • which in turn follows from his inherently interpersonal understanding of the psyche.
      • Crucially, what goes wrong is not to be located in the individual per se,
      • but in the experiential units that the person was and is involved including, by extension,
        • the sociocultural milieu in which they find themselves.

• for: constructivism, constructivism ,- Winnicott
• comment
  • Winnicott could appreciate that we play a significant role in constructing the world we inhabit

• for: Donald Winnicott, quote, quote - Donald Winnicott, quote - human INTERbeing, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, white - humans INTERbeCOMing, DH, Deep Humanity, altricial, mOTHER, non-duality

• quote: Donald Winnicott

  • There is no such thing as a baby … if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.

• comment

  • what Winnicott says here is the essence of:
    • the Deep Humanity concepts of
      • the individual / collective gestalt and
      • human INTERbeCOMing,
    • the Buddhist concepts of:
      • emptiness,
      • non-duality in the human realm,
      • Indra's net of jewels in the human realm and
      • Thich Nhat Hahn's INTERbeing
    • complexity

• for: human INTERbeCOMing, human INTERbeing, DH, Deep Humanity, Donald Winnicott

• quote

  • He (Donald Winnicott) largely circumvented the subject-object dualism inherent in the Freudian model of mind (which both the Ego-psychologists and the Kleinians subscribed to) and
    • espoused, or at least regularly insinuated, a fundamentally unitary conception of self and other.

• comment -The Deep Humanity definition of the individual / collective gestalt identifies the indivisible nature of the individual and collective.

  • It can also need called the ' self / other gestalt' and both are really another way to articulate non-duality in between members of the same species
  • a ' unitary conception of self and other' is yet another way to articulate this same thing

for: human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, DH, Deep Humanity

!- definition : good enough * From Donald Winnicot, a parent who is "good enough" is actually healthier for the child than the standard "ideal" parent. * A "good enough" parent does not force the child to choose between two aspects of wellbeing, both of which are necessary.