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GOOD ENOUGH

LOVE

The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who specialised in working with parents and children, was disturbed by how often he encountered in his consulting rooms parents who were disappointed with themselves. They felt they were failing as parents and hated themselves as a result. They were ashamed of their occasional rows, their bursts of short temper, their times of boredom around their own children and their many mistakes. What struck Winnicott, however, was that these people were almost always not bad parents at all. They were loving, often very kind and very interested in their children. They tried hard to meet their needs and to understand their problems as best they could. As parents, they were – in his memorable and important phrase – ‘good enough’. Winnicott identified a crucial issue. We often torment ourselves because we have in our minds a demanding – and in fact impossible – vision of what we are supposed to be like across a range of areas of our lives. This vision does not emerge from a careful study of what actual people are like. Instead it’s a fantasy, a punitive perfectionism, drawn from the cultural ether. With the phrase ‘good enough’, Winnicott wanted to move us away from idealisation. Ideals may sound nice, but they bring a terrible problem in their wake: they can make us despair of the merely quite good things we already do and have. By dialling down our expectations, the idea of ‘good enough’ resensitises us to the lesser, but very real, virtues we already possess, but that our unreal hopes have made us overlook. A ‘good enough’ life is not a bad life: it is the best existence that humans are ever likely to lead.


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