The False Self From Childhood

I ran across a developmental psychology theory not long ago that I’ve had bouncing around in the back of my head ever since. It comes from the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who coined the term “good-enough mother” to describe the everyday kind of parent who does their best to meet their child’s needs and only fails at doing so in ordinary and understandable, even inevitable ways. His theory is about the origins and development of two distinct selves in each of us, a “true self” and a “false self.”

As babies and very young children, Winnicott says, each of us instinctively expresses our true selves: we cry when we’re hungry or tired or in distress; as toddlers, we act with creativity and spontaneity without much (if any) thought about what’s correct or proper, and we can have the most dramatic emotional outbursts when we don’t get what we want. We can’t help but express our true selves when we’re very young, because we can’t do otherwise; we need what we need and we want what we want, and we do our best to get it.

And here’s the crux of the whole thing: If our caregivers are attuned and capable, if they’re able to read our true expressions of need and want and (mostly) gratify them most of the time, it strengthens a belief in us that our most honest needs are okay, and that we ourselves are relatable and worthy. If we receive this “true self” recognition and reassurance as children, then we’re much more likely to move into adulthood connected to our true self, willing to live openly, alive and present to our most deeply felt longings.

But some of us don’t get that much-needed reassurance. As very young children we express our truest needs and our caregivers can’t respond adequately or consistently, due to things like depression or addiction, and we come to learn that our most basic needs aren’t acceptable or relatable. Winnicott says that in cases like this a child becomes “compliant,” meaning they don’t just stop expressing their truest needs to caregivers unable or unwilling to meet them, they lose touch with those deepest needs by convincing themselves they weren’t the very things they needed in the first place. This adaptive story is, according to Winnicott, the birth of the “false self,” which is also the compliant self.

More simply put, I think the theory is that when we’re very young, we need to have adults around us who are strong enough and capable enough and loving enough that we can express our wants and desires with as much anti-social self-centeredness as humanly possible, and they will consistently love us unconditionally, accept us, and give us what we need most of the time. By doing so, they teach us that we can truly be our most authentic selves and the world will still hold us, accept us, even love us. And when we don’t get that, we learn the opposite: that the world might not accept us and almost certainly won’t love us if we express our true needs or callings. And even more, we’ll do such a good job convincing ourselves we don’t want what we in fact need, that we’ll live lives divorced from our creativity and passions because we can’t find our way back to them after those first and formative lies. We’ll be lost in our false selves, accommodating others, not trusting the world to be strong or capable enough to hold us dearly.