The New Yorker:

We keep revising the maternal ideal—and keep falling short of it.

By Rebecca Mead

Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst who wrote extensively and compassionately about the relationships between mothers and their infants, is best known among a general readership for coining the expression “the good-enough mother.” Winnicott started using the term to distinguish his observations from the theories of Melanie Klein, whose work held great sway among analysts in the mid-century. Klein had conceptualized a distinction between the “good breast” and the “bad breast” as a way of understanding the drama of an infant’s early experiences of omnipotence and frustration. In a letter to a colleague, from 1952, Winnicott noted that Klein was describing objects within the infant’s psyche; he himself, however, was concerned with real women and real babies. “I always talk about ‘the good-enough mother’ or ‘the not-good-enough mother,’ because in point of fact we are talking about the actual woman, we know that the best she can do is to be good enough,” Winnicott explained.

Within Winnicott’s framework, the good-enough mother is one who, initially acceding entirely to a newborn’s demands, intuits how, over time, she might incrementally hold back from offering immediate gratification, thereby facilitating the necessary development of her child’s sense of self as a separate individual. In his writing for nonspecialists, and for new mothers in particular, Winnicott emphasized that, in most instances, a mother’s attunement to what her baby needs arises naturally, without the intervention or instruction of experts. “In the ordinary things you do you are quite naturally doing very important things, and the beauty of it is that you do not have to be clever, and you do not even have to think if you do not want to,” Winnicott wrote in “The Child, the Family, and the Outside World,” a book aimed at new mothers, first published in 1964. He added, “If you love your baby he or she is getting a good start.”

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