I agree with Carl Rogers who asserted that the human baby arrives complete with unconditional self-regard and expects to find that as the culture of their life. Children have to be cudgelled into giving up this expectation. We grow unwillingly into adults who disdain and withhold appreciation. Fortunately, thinking pairs can restore both our experience of it and our expertise at it. And before we know it, we live it.

As Adam Phillips describes it, “In Winnicott’s view, the mind is that part of the self invented to cover for, to manage, any felt unreliability in the caregiving environment. It is, as it were, a necessary fiction, born of expedience, and therefore potentially tainted by (unconscious) resentment. Whenever the world is not good enough one has a mind instead.

Buddhist thought has been helpful for me with this because the Buddha’s first noble truth—that life is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness (or suffering)—takes it as a given that there is always some way that we feel unseen, unknown, or unrecognized.

Psychoanalysis has explored many of the most obvious parental failings that contribute to such feelings but, in trying to find the source, or the cause, of personal uncertainty, it has encouraged people to overly blame their families of origin rather than taking on the responsibility of reaching out to establish whatever kinds of connections are actually possible in life.

”All we do in successful psychoanalysis is to unhitch developmental hold-ups, and to release developmental processes and the inherited tendencies of the individual patient. In a peculiar way we can actually alter the patient’s past, so that a patient whose maternal development was not good enough can change into a person who has had a good-enough facilitating environment, and whose personal growth has therefore been able to take place, though late.” - Winnicott

He [Winnicott] was by no means a Buddhist, but I believe he, too, healed by modeling being. He mostly used mother/infant vocabulary to describe his mode of relating, but this did not stop him from describing, in disarmingly frank terms, his own internal process:

It is only in recent years that I have become able to wait and

wait . . . and to avoid breaking up this natural process by making

interpretations. . . . It appals me to think how much deep change I

have prevented or delayed . . . by my personal need to interpret. If

only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively

and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to

enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let

the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is

that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We

may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or

become aware of it with acceptance.