103. Letter from Donald Winnicott to a Patient, 13th December 1966

13th December 1966.

Dear Mrs. N:

Thank you for your letter. I do find it very difficult to advise you. Even to see you once would be very difficult for me at the present time. I wonder if you would like to get an interview with one of my colleagues …

From your description it seems as if you are beginning to feel real especially in relation to your painting, and it seems to me to be of little importance in these experiences whether you are in the present or in your childhood or in your infancy. It is just here that the various dates join up together like the parts of an old-fashioned telescope. There is always the possibility of course that it is best not to see anyone at all but to carry on, hoping that someone will look at your paintings and judge them not in the way you do as a kind of therapeutics, but as paintings. In this way you may find some of them on a wall somewhere with people looking at them, but course these will be the ones in which you have managed to disguise the bit that is important to you.

Let me know what happens.

Yours sincerely,

D. W. Winnicott, F.R.C.P.