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.

The Buddha’s teachings run counter to this tendency to find fault. He normalized feelings of inadequacy and threw responsibility back onto the individual to sort them out. He taught mindfulness as a method of probing the self and found that impartial attention to moment-to-moment experience yields surprising but predictable insights into the self’s

contingent and relational nature. These insights, which precipitate spontaneously out of concentrated attention and mindful reflection, make abundantly clear that our habitual efforts to defend ourselves against our intrinsic groundlessness make things even worse.

In one of his most important papers, “The Development of the Capacity for Concern,” written in 1963, toward the end of his life, Winnicott explained how important it is to help patients explore the ways that anger has kept them under its spell. Concern for others, he made clear, depends on being able to see others as whole people in and of themselves rather than as being there only to serve one’s needs.

His mother was a compelling figure, the center of the household, who indulged Steve as long as he did not question her, but ignored him when he did. We might say she was there as an “object-mother” but erratic as an “environment-mother.” This created a big problem for him. There was no room for integrating his anger in this relationship, no possibility of Steve’s mom ever admitting a flaw, and no acknowledgment of Steve’s independent point of view. The natural give-and-take of a mother-child relationship, in which both parent and child get disappointed with one another but learn to tolerate, and forgive, on the road to becoming

interpenetrating centers never happened.

Steve, we began to see, was never given the chance to work productively with his own aggression. It was as if he had no guidance through the inevitable disappointments of early 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