As Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, notes, “the following poem speaks of the absence of what became, in Winnicott’s developmental theory, the formative experience in the child’s life; the way the mother, in the fullest sense, ‘holds’ the child.  Poetry is not an indulgence or a luxury: it's the key to who we are, and central to the therapeutic process."

The Tree

Mother below is weeping
    weeping
    weeping

Thus I knew her
Once, Stretched out on her lap
as now on a dead tree
I learned to 
make her smile
to stem her tears
to undo her guilt
to cure her inward death
To enliven her was my living


D.W. Winnicott