D.W. Winnicott Maternal failures produce phases of reaction to impingement and these reactions interrupt the 'going on being' of the infant. An excess of this reacting produces not frustration but a threat of annihilation. This in my view is a very real primitive anxiety, long antedating any anxiety that includes the word death in its description. (from 'Primary Maternal Preoccupation,' 1956) --very real--

It is sometimes assumed that in health the individual is always integrated, as well as living in his own body, and able to feel that the world is real. There is, however, much sanity that has a symptomatic quality, being charged with fear or denial of madness, fear or denial of the innate capacity of every human being to become unintegrated, depersonalized, and to feel that the world is unreal. (from "Primitive Emotional Development," 1945)

It is in the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between people--the transitional space--that intimate relationships and creativity occur. (from "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena," 1951)

One has to include in one's theory of the development of a human being the idea that it is normal and healthy for the individual to be able to defend the self against specific environmental failure by a freezing of the failure situation. Along with this goes an unconscious assumption (which can become a conscious hope) that opporunity will occur at a later date for a renewed experience in which the failure situation will be able to be unfrozen and reexperienced, with the individual in a regressed state, in an environment that is making adequate adaptation. The theory is here being put forward of regression as part of a healing process, in fact, a normal phenomenon that can be properly studies in the healthy person. (from "Metapsychological and Clinical Aspects of Regression within the Psychoanalytic Setup," 1954)

In the cases on which my work is based there has been what I call a true self hidden, protected by a false self. This false self is no doubt an aspect of the true self. It hides and protects it, and it reacts to the adaptation failures and develops a pattern corresponding to the pattern of environmental failure. In this way the true self is not involved in the reacting, and so preserves a continuity of being. However, this hidden true self suffers an impoverishment that derives from lack of experience. check. (from "Clinical Varieties of Transference," 1955-56)

not good enough then the infant does not really come into existence, since there is no continuity of being; instead the personality becomes built on the basis of reactions to environmental impingement. (from "The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship," 1960)
..the true self does not become a living reality except as a result of the mother's repeated success in meeting the infant's spontaneous gesture or sensory hallucination. (from "Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self," 1960) The true self comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body functions, including the heart's action and breathing. It is closely linked with the idea of the primacy process, and is, at the beginning, essentially not reactive to external stimuli, but primary. (from "Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self," 1960)

...there are many patients who need us to be able to give them a capacity to use us." (from "The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications," 1969)