The Sense of Being
One of the elements Winnicott considered could be lost in childhood was what he called the sense of being. 'For Winnicott, the sense of being is primary, the sense of doing an outgrowth of it...Premature development of the ego-function means doing too much, being too little': a false sense of self. The 'capacity to "be", to feel alive...the baby's lifeline, what Winnicott calls its "going on being"' was essential if a person was not to be 'caught up in a false self and a compulsive cycle of "doing" to conceal the absence of "being"'. One antidote to the potential loss of being was the child's capacity for play.
Read more about this topic: Donald Winnicott
Famous quotes containing the word sense:
“Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitions ... he has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover’s sense of the moment of crisis, and he knew ... how costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)