Donald Winnicott - The Sense of Being

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.