Babies and Their Mothers

A collection of nine texts by the psychoanalyst and pediatrician, Donald Winnicott, specialized in childcare. The volume also features three unpublished texts by the author on the mother-infant relationship, and a preface by Maria Rita Kehl. This new translation has technical advice formed by Ana Lila Lejarraga, Christian Dunker, Gilberto Safra, Tales Ab'Saber, Leopoldo Fulgencio. Throughout the texts, the author seeks to encourage mothers to trust their instincts in caring for their babies. It identifies in the first days and months of the baby's life the foundations of what his mental health will be and reinforces the importance of the mother-infant pair, in which there is a kind of symbiosis, for mental health. Among the classic terms coined by Winnicott and described here is the holding, as a metonym of the way the mother provides support for her child to become a healthy person, the good enough mother, who is not even omnipotent and seeks to heal any suffering of the child, neither absent nor distant, leaving the child helpless — and the facilitating environment — which provides both the baby's development and the failures necessary for the constitution of its identity.