ABSTRACT
This Winnicott chapter is one of the cornerstones of this thinking process about the foundational elements of our being as humans. His central thesis is that our thinking apparatus as adults—our mind—is designed to be nested-in and infused with the ground of somatic experience. He says that the very first sense of our own psyche as infants is our experiencing of ourselves as physical beings. There is the physical experience, and then there is the imaginative elaboration of that experience. These, in interplay, are the initial building blocks of the human psyche. He asserts that when a baby has to adapt to certain kinds and degrees of maternal failure that exceed the growing baby’s psyche-soma’s capacities, the mind—the baby’s not-yet-ready thinking process—has to step up and take over, and prematurely organize the care of the baby’s own psyche-soma—something that the maternal environment was meant to do. This early maladaptation affects all subsequent stages of development, causing among other things an over-reliance on the (disembodied) mind, and a strong tendency to become the caretaker in intimate relationships, which comes with their having a difficult time allowing themselves to be the recipient of care in such relationships.
