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:
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear- headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)