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:
“Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration; some words go off, and become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense or notion, which in tract of time makes an observable change in the air and features of a language, as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.”
—Richard Bentley (1662–1742)