Donald Woods Winnicott famous quotes

06-24-2025

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

#Children #Self #Play
Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Music #Artist #People
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

#Mother #Baby #Children
Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.
-- Donald Woods 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 Woods Winnicott

#Mother #Children #Father
It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Joy #Disaster #Found
The fact that grief takes so long to resolve is not a sign of inadequacy, but betokens depth of soul.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Grief #Long #Soul
It is in playing, and perhaps only in playing, that the child is free to be creative.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Children #Play #Creative
We fight to exist. Personally, I am not ashamed of fighting to exist. We are doing no very extraordinary thing to fight simply because we do not wish to be enslaved or exterminated.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Fighting #History #Wish
There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Baby
The scientific approach to the phenomenon of human nature enables us to be ignorant without bieng frightened, and without, therefore, having to invent all sorts of wierd theories to explain away our gaps in knowledge.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Ignorant #Gaps #Human Nature
The precursor of the mirror is the mother's face.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Mom #Mother #Mirrors
There is for many a poverty of play.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Play #Poverty
Play like dreams serves the function of self realization.
-- Donald Woods Winnicott

#Dream #Philosophy #Self

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