Winnicott on the qualities of a healthy mind and a healthy relationship, the penguin's antidote to abandonment, boundaries as frontiers of growth

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[Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship]( “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James {NAME} wrote in [one of his finest essays](. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” It is a powerful sentiment and a dangerous one, because if mutual salvation is not the byproduct of a healthy relationship but an expectation upon entering into one, it can bleed into destructive codependence. And yet we know from [the neurobiology of limbic revision]( that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” Whether a relationship ends up rewiring or deepening unhealthy attachment patterns encoded early in life depends largely on the expectations we bring to it, and can change from one to the other as the expectations change. When we approach one another with curiosity and care without the expectation of curing each other, something paradoxical and miraculous may happen — the care may become the cure. The Latin of the word “cure” — cūra — means “anxiety,” which is also the root of “care” (to have cares, to be anxious), “curiosity” (an anxious inquisitiveness), and “secure” (without anxiety and care). Art by Sophie Blackall from [Things to Look Forward to]( The pioneering pediatrician turned psychoanalyst [Donald Winnicott]( (April 7, 1896–January 28, 1971) understood uniquely the interplay of the two in the making of secure and healthy relationships. Trained as a physician — a profession predicated on cures — Winnicott came to psychoanalysis skeptical of applying the disease model of medicine to the health of the psyche. For him, proper therapy offered not just a cure of symptoms but “a more widely based personality richer in feeling and more tolerant of others because more sure of [oneself]” — a radically countercultural notion amid a therapy culture predicated on curing pathologies. Winnicott placed at the center of a healthy and secure relationship — between a therapist and a patient, as much as between two private human beings — what he termed care-cure. In the final months of his life, he developed this notion in a talk delivered to doctors and nurses in St. Luke’s Church, later included in the altogether fantastic posthumous collection [Home Is Where We Start from: Essays by a Psychoanalyst]( ([public library](. With an eye to what is at the heart of this care-cure concept, Winnicott observes: We are talking about love, but… the meaning of the word must be spelt out. One of artist Margaret C. Cook’s [rare 1913 illustrations]( for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available [as a print]( In spelling out the primary qualities of a true care-cure relationship — it must be non-moralistic, truthful, and reliable — Winnicott places especial emphasis on reliability as a way of protecting the other from unpredictability, since the root of suffering for many is that “they have been subjected as part of the pattern of their lives to the unpredictable.” (All trust is, in a sense, a handshake of predictability, and every breach of trust is devastating precisely because the other person has unpredictably withdrawn their hand.) Winnicott considers the cost of unpredictability: Behind unpredictability lies mental confusion, and behind that there can be found chaos in terms of somatic functioning, i.e. unthinkable anxiety that is physical. To be capable of a care-cure relationship, with all its requisite predictability, one must therefore be free of mental confusion and balanced enough to show up in a reliable way. Winnicott offers a definition of a healthy mind that doubles as a fundamental definition of healthy love: A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us. Art from [Birds by Brian Wildsmith]( This imaginative interpenetration of experience is necessary for the greatest challenge of consciousness — understanding what it is like to be another. Without it, there can be no love, for we cannot love whom we do not understand — then we are pseudo-loving a projection. A sign of healthy love, therefore, is the ability to be reliable and responsible with — which is different from being responsible for — the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of the other. Complement with Alain de Botton, writing a generation after Winnicott, on [the qualities of a healthy mind]( and Adrienne Rich, writing in Winnicott’s day, on [the mark of an honorable human relationship]( then revisit Winnicott [on motherhood]( that fundament of our hardest-wired attachment patterns. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [Honing Life on the Edges of the Possible: Geologist Turned Psychoanalyst Ruth Allen on Boundaries and Limits as Frontiers of Transformation and Growth]( It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know our depths and our limits, to know where we end and the rest of the world begins. And it is often at the edges, those boundary regions between one state of being and another, that we fathom ourselves, that we grow most alive — after all, life itself began in Earth’s tide pools, that fertile boundary between the depths of the ocean and the limits of the land. The vital interplay between boundaries and growth, the catalytic function of limits, the way we hone our lives on the edges of the possible, is what geologist turned psychotherapist Ruth Allen explores in her uncommonly wonderful book [Weathering]( ([public library](. Looking back to her unusual pivot of purpose, Allen finds in the realities of the physical world a poignant metaphor for the life of the psyche: Mountains can only be maintained because they are also places of vast removal. Through a process called isostacy, uplands and mountains accumulate material, making them heavier, and then weather and erode to become lighter again, causing crust to rebound as the earth maintains its balance, which it must do. Upland areas that are still uplifting, such as the Peak District, are doing so precisely because of the erosion that is constantly unburdening the land of their material. In short, stuff must be lost for everything to keep rising. This tells me two fundamental truths: one, that in order to evolve and grow, we must be prepared to face the erosive aspects of life. Two, it’s the weathering that creates the finest landscape of our lives, shaping us and defining us over time. […] Instead of understanding the erosion rates of rock, I became more enthralled by what weathers a person, and what if anything can be done about that. What happens when the earth is shaken under our feet, undermining the foundations of everything we have known? How do we live with (or even close) the fault lines that open through trauma? How do we negotiate erosive and accumulative periods over time? What would it really mean to weather well? Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available [as a print]( It is often at the fault lines where we rupture that we repair ourselves into a new and stronger way of being. In a sentiment that touches on [the fundamental paradox of personal change]( Allen writes: At almost every conceivable level of our imagining, it is impossible to create a change without a discontinuity, without a moment of not knowing who we are, or what we are going to become. Rupture precedes revolution. Rupture redefines our limits, remaps the boundaries of our self-knowledge, redraws the edge of the possible. And yet we recoil at the very notion of it, wired as we are for the safety of stasis. Allen considers our cognitive dissonance about these transformative regions of being: As humans, we have a confused relationship with edges, boundaries and limitations, which can be seen as one and the same thing, unified paradoxically by their dividing potential… We seek them even when, as a psychological or relational construct, we recoil from their necessity, and will often find ourselves drawn to and entranced by the water’s edge: the shifting line between sand and sea, the horror of the cliff’s edge. Our pull towards edges is magnetic, our playfulness around them notable. We are compelled to edges, boundaries and limits, like an intrusive thought that we don’t want but can’t resist going towards… Edges are, in some ways, an embodiment of the core dilemma about how to live, and how to live under the spectre of death. Boundaries say here is OK, but beyond is the insistent abyss, and I am curious about that. Limits give us a place to challenge ourselves and triumph over. They provide an opportunity for growth, where going beyond a limit can test our courage, expand our hitherto unknown ability, and consolidate our resilience for yet another new horizon that appears as we pass through what’s now behind us. In short, edges are frontiers where we find ourselves. They are also often where we find each other — the most transformative relationships create a Venn diagram of boundaries, take place at the edge between who we thought we were and who we can be, shifting that edge. Sam Shepard knew this when he [reflected on love]( “There can be a real meeting between two people at the point where they always felt marooned. Right at the edge.” Allen agrees: In the overlap between people’s boundaries there is potential for interesting meetings and the potential for collapses. Art by Ofra Amit for [The Universe in Verse]( book That dual potential has to do with the nature of boundaries as the edge between the known and the unknown, between safety and risk. Defining a boundary as “a change point — a moment in space and time when what was no longer is, and a new state is emerging,” Allen writes: Being alive in any meaningful sense is a balance of feeling and staying safe, and taking and overcoming risks. In safety, we have a vital place to rest, be comfortable and build the foundations of a life, and through risk we are expanded and grown… It is through taking risks that we expand our safety – widening the boundaries and limitations of our existence into ever-broadening and rich terrains… In therapy… pushing our psychological and emotional limits in creative ways. Real and effective trauma work is about carefully restoring the inner grounds of self-trust and trust-in-world, increasing our capacity for risk, not striving to make the world safe. And yet at the heart of self-trust is knowing and honoring our limits — those safety valves between self and world. (This is why some of the most unsafe people to be in relationship with are people not aware of their own limits.) Allen writes: Limits may slow us down long enough to breathe in what we already have, but they do not reduce meaning. In some cases, they may generate more. We’re not designed to be at capacity all the time, endlessly stimulated by activities, saturated in tasks to tick off… To remind ourselves of our limits is a kindness. The great payoff of knowing the boundaries of our being is the wise discrimination of knowing when and whether to push them in order to grow. In another poignant geological analogy, Allen writes: Reaching our boundaries is not the same as limiting our growth. Sometimes we find our edges and an amazing thing happens; capacity is rebuilt, old wounds are healed and we grow further and more beautifully than before. The process is analogous to mineral growth in rock. Without a surface and a set of containing edges, minerals that we prize for their beauty, function and even healing properties do not have the right conditions to develop. Crystals do not grow in the open, where space is boundless. Where crystals become their most vivid and multi-faceted is where there is containment that gives shape and definition to what is alchemically coming together on the inside. We all need a container to hold and ferment the rich potential of our energy and talents — this is the crucible of newness from which all creativity and life flows. In the remainder of the altogether magnificent [Weathering]( Allen goes on to explore geology as a lens on grief (“the most raw and frantic way of experiencing the words I love“), ecosomatics (“an emergent nature-based discipline at the intersection between ecology, the environment, and the lived experience of the body”), and other facets of what it means to live in a physical world as a physical being limited by time and flesh, set free by the unlimited potential of the psyche. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [How Evolution Invented Faith: The Patience of the Penguin and the Art of Withstanding Abandonment]( “Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on [the paradox of closeness and separation](. To be separated from a loved one — in space or in silence, by choice or by circumstance — is a singularly discomposing experience. It takes a tremendous effort of the psyche to keep oneself from feeling abandoned, and [we know from fMRI studies]( that every abandonment is experienced as a miniature death because the brain registers a loved one’s death — the ultimate abandonment — simply as a sudden and inexplicable separation. Art from [An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days](. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( benefitting the Audubon Society.) We may call that tremendous effort faith. The wives of whalers had it when their husbands left on perilous voyages of months or years — faith that time and chance would smile upon that particular precious life adrift on the turbulent waters. Parents have it when their child takes those first steps, runs that first errand, goes to college — faith that across the developmental stages of individuation and separation, some unbroken bond of love will remain. Friends and lovers have it each time they embrace goodbye — faith that it will not be the last embrace. But no one in the history of the world has had more faith in the face of separation and uncertainty than the penguin. Penguins mate for life and lay one egg per year, which the parents take turns incubating and nursing for long stretches as each ventures into the sea hunting for food. The separation can last for months, during which the starving parent protecting the egg must retain unfaltering faith in the mate’s return — for if they too leave the nursery and go in search of food, the egg will perish. The extraordinary extent of that faith and the heroic patience it requires of the penguin come alive on the pages of [Voyage Through the Antarctic]( ([public library]( — a collaboration between ornithologist and conservationist Ronald Lockley and novelist Richard Adams, who traveled together through the polar regions a decade after Adams wrote the repeatedly rejected manuscript turned modern classic [Watership Down](. The King Penguin by Thomas Waterman Wood, 1871. (Available as [a print]( Celebrating the emperor penguin as “a miracle of antarctic evolution” — its six-month courtship, its immense single-file march to remembered nursery sites far from the sea, its devoted co-parenting — Adams writes: On the frozen breeding-grounds no food is accessible. The sea steadily retreats — perhaps for as much as 125 miles — as the winter ice extends outwards from Antarctica. When at last, in May, the female lays the single large (about 0.5 kg) egg, there is much excitement and mutual “talk.” The male awaits its appearance intently, and with his curved beak at once rolls it over his feet and up into a kind of pouch between his legs, where it is protected by a large flap of feathered belly skin and warmed by contact with the naked, hidden brood patch. If he did not do this, the egg would freeze within one minute. Exhausted by her efforts, and starving, having lost much weight during the long fast of mating and egg-building, the female now waddles seaward, tobogganing down slopes and now and then sleeping for short periods among the ice-hills. It takes her days, even weeks to reach open water, where she sets about restoring her body fat — a long recovery of vitality before she can return to the nursery at the end of the two-month incubation period. During that time, the males survive by crowding together in a solid shield known as testudo, which allows them to maximize body heat and keep from being blown away by the ferocious polar gales. It is only when the female returns to take over parenting duties that the male, weak and famished, can set out to sea to restore himself, having persevered through his mate’s long absence with total trust in her return. Adams marvels at this unparalleled act of faith: The male’s stoic, heroic devotion to his duty as incubator and nurse must be unique in nature, involving that almost incredibly long fast under conditions of exposure to intense frost that would kill most other living creatures. It is at last rewarded, while the rookery is still sunless in July, by the return of his mate, fat an full-bellied from her long sojourn amid the krill and small fishes. She has had an even longer walk back to the rookery, since water ice is still forming far at sea. She usually arrives a few days after the chick is born at the time when, getting hungry, it begins to poke its head into the air and whine for food. The male, by an unusual provision of nature, manufactures sufficient nourishing fluid from bile and stomach secretions to keep the infant alive until the female arrives. In a testament to [voice as the fingerprint of the soul]( Adams adds: When the female returns, she calls to and recognizes her mate by voice. This is a kind of ceremony, which may take some time, since after two months of testudo and other movement the mate is not likely to be where she left him nursing the precious egg. Once the ceremony of vocal recognition is over, the female persuades her mate to yield the chick to her. Within seconds it is transferred to her pouch. The male, in his turn, is now free to set out on the long walk to the ocean feeding-grounds… And here we rind another remarkable and unusual natural provision: the mother is able not only to live off her body fat but also to conserve the contents of her stomach to dole out enough daily food to keep the chick going until the male returns. That penguins have survived by an act of faith since they first diverged from albatrosses 71 million years ago is not only a miracle of evolution — there alongside such improbable and astonishing things as [the eye of the scallop]( [the periodicity of the cicada]( and [REM]( — but a living testament to patience as the guardian of love and the engine of the possible, a model for refusing to experience absence as abandonment, that miniature of death. For only love — the tenacity of it, the faith in it, the infinity of shapes it can take — makes life more stubborn than death. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. ALSO [THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE BOOK]( [---]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out on Sunday mornings and synthesizes what I publish on the site throughout the week. The Marginalian NOT RECEIVING MAIL 47 Bergen Street, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](