Just as your relationships with loved ones, coworkers and yourself, you have a relationship with time. The way you think about time, spend your time and react to the calendar or clock all have to do with this relationship. For me, I used to feel like I am either running out of time or that time is working against me. This perspectives led to a lot of anxiety, panic, rushing, frustration and victim thinking. But what if time didn’t have that much power over you? You are time, you are where time comes from. And since you are the producer of time, you can make as much of it as you need. I spend most of my time working, exercising, and having fun with friends and family.
Donald Winnicott started his career as a paediatrician but in the Second World War he got involved in setting up homes for traumatised children whose foster placements had broken down. This led to him becoming more interested in psychotherapy and he was introduced to Melanie Klein who was making great waves of her own analysing children. As a child psychoanalyst, Winnicott was a passionate believer in play; indeed this is where his theories come alive, “It is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health” (1971: 41), and through these observations one begins to understanding the type of relationship the child has with their parents. For any psychotherapist, this is key, but in order to understand why a child may find it difficult to play, it is necessary to go back to their earliest experiences.
‘’There is no such thing as a baby” (1958, p.99) said Winnicott, meaning that where there’s a baby there is always a maternal adult. And so begins the journey of what Winnicott calls the “good enough mother” (1971: 10). This is the mother able to create an illusion of oneness with her baby, able to adapt to its needs, which makes him feel safe and omnipotent. One way this happens is via the breast, the baby becomes hungry and the breast appears. “It is, as it were under the baby’s magical control” (1971: 11).
However not even the “good enough mother” (Winnicott, 1971: 10-11) is able to be there all the time and therefore the baby must learn to cope with feelings of frustration and separation; in other words disillusion (ibid.). The weaning process is a form of separation, but from the breast. Arguably weaning is a difficult adjustment for a number of babies, which perhaps adds weight to Winnicott’s concept. In fact he reminds us “If illusion-disillusionment has gone astray the infant cannot get to so normal a thing as weaning” (1971: 13).
However, not every child is breast-fed, indeed Winnicott reminds us that being fed by bottle doesn’t equate to being a bad mother (1971: 11). What I’m able to take away from the concept of “illusion – disillusion” (1971: 13) is the baby’s perception of how its Mother is able to attune to it’s every need, both physically and mentally giving the illusion “that what the infant creates really exists” (1971: 12).
What would happen if the mother were unable to foster the illusion of omnipotence, pe
