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 wiring for change is built in, but some sort of benevolent attention has to activate it. Winnicott called this the “facilitating environment” and linked it to a mother’s natural, and “good-enough,” devotion. He believed that aggression is intrinsic to a baby’s psyche, that it shows up as an aspect of an infant’s inherent self-centeredness, and that a good-enough parent coaxes a child—over time— from total demandingness into a recognition of the parent as a person in their own right.

The emotional consequences are too intense for the child to bear and, to protect himself or herself, dissociation takes place in which the unbearable feelings are closed off and put aside so that the child can go forward safely. A kind of armor is created, but the unmanageable feelings lurk and rise up unbidden at inopportune times as if out of nowhere. Winnicott described such feelings as like being “infinitely dropped,” and eloquently wrote of how the afflicted person often fears a breakdown that has already happened. The person projects the thing from the past into the future because they were not able to be present with the breakdown when it was actually taking place. To be free, they have to be able to remember the trauma that was never fully experienced, and they have to be able to put it in its proper place in history.

Winnicott, and here the parallels to the Buddha are difficult to ignore, believed that “being” precedes “doing,” and that its recovery is the route back to our original nature. He felt that “being” is everyone’s birthright, but that it is something of a lost art, that compliance often robs people of it, that creativity depends on it, and that therapy can serve as a means of rediscovering it if a therapist is sensitive to the need and does not let their male element, in the form of intrusive interpretations, however erudite they may be, interfere. The Buddha, to my mind, thought along the same lines. He said that our original nature is obscured by our cravings and our frustrations, that the ego that emerges in healthy emotional development, while necessary for some things, also blocks us from our underlying and inherent freedom. “Be here now,” my old friend Ram Dass used to proclaim, making it sound as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

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.