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In its preoccupation with what the mother is like in reality, psychoanalysis has tended to overlook the fact that what is decisive in the individual's development is the unconscious image that he has projected onto her. No one has expatiated more convincingly on the “good-enough mother” and “the facilitating environment” than Winnicott.31 For that reason this sentence of his is pertinent: “Whatever are the external factors, it is the individual's view (fantasy) of the external factor that counts.”
An event of itself bodes neither good nor ill; what is decisive is the individual's reaction to it. There is a passage in the Encheiridion where Epictetus6 states, “What troubles people is not events but their judgments about events: for example, death is nothing to be feared; what causes fear is our judgment that death is fearful.”*
The current preoccupation with the environment makes it easy to shift the responsibility for neurosis onto the mother, a tendency that is literally as old as Adam. The pallid Pelagian belief that “human nature remains indestructibly good” finds its most popular expression in the tabula rasa school of thought: if it were not for the stupidities and malice of the caretaking environment, the individual would automatically progress to perfection. Taking this to its logical conclusion, we arrive at the famous formulation: there are no problem children, only problem parents. Stripped of its psychological trappings, this is essentially the old Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. As our fate is decreed by environmental factors or by the stars in their courses, there is nothing that we can do about ourselves—“as if,” as Lear derisively