D.W. Winnicott

"If mothers are told to do this or that or the other, they lose touch with their own ability to act. Only too easily they feel incompetent. If they must look up everything in a book, they are always too late even when they do the right things, because the right things have to be done immediately. It is only possible to act at exactly the right point when the action is intuitive or by instinct, as we say. The mind can be brought to bear on the problem afterwards.

"I don't mind saying in advance that in my opinion jealousy is normal and healthy. Jealousy arises out of the fact that children lo ve. If they have no capacity to love, then they don't show jealousy."

"It's only too easy to idealise a mother's job. We know well that every job has its frustrations and its boring routines and its times of being the last thing anyone would choose to do. Well, why shouldn't the care of babies and children be thought of that way too?"


"If you could choose your parents, we would rather have a mother who felt a sense of guilt--at any rate who felt responsible, and felt that if things went wrong it was probably her fault--we'd rather have that than a mother who immediately turned to an outside thing to explain everything, and said it was due to the thunderstorm last night or some quite outside phenomenon and didn't take responsibility for anything."