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6th October 1967.
Dear Mrs. Nelson,
Thank you for writing. There is a great deal in your letter and I cannot pretend to have properly assimilated it all yet. Everything that you say is of great interest to me. What I want to do is to try to meet your first comment.
It seems I must have failed somehow or other in Chapter 161 in my attempt to point out that in health the child has to come gradually to some personal method of accommodating rather than “getting rid of” aggressive feelings and impulses. I feel that in the process the child usually acts out in an aggressive way from time to time and that this is all part of life and that the mother and the father get involved and sometimes hurt. I do not mean that it seems to me good for parents to get hurt. In a sense it is their fault because on the whole they can protect themselves, but they can do this best if they know what to expect. This is rather a big subject and I do not want to spoil it by offering titbits; I would rather leave it to the imagination.
The fact does remain, however, that some parents have a problem on their hands, a child who seems to need to hurt them. There is no simple answer to this detail of management when it is a problem in the care of one child, but I suppose parents do somehow or other usually find a way of protecting themselves without reacting in such a way that the child's aggressive impulses are driven further into the unconscious so that they are liable then to appear in the form of symptoms.
I am not very pleased with this that I have written but I really wanted to write something to you in acknowledgement of your kind and interesting letter.
Yours sincerely,
D. W. Winnicott, F.R.C.P.