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Winnicott links the acquisition of a child’s “sense of being” with parental care, and particularly with maternal holding, allowing the child to go from the non-integration of his/her personality to its integration through stages of, first, total dependence, then partial dependence, toward more and more independence. The author suggests that this process can be understood in terms of “structural stability,” allowing the infant to construct an internal world and his/her identity. He gives an illustration of this hypothesis with an extract of a mother/child psychotherapeutic treatment of an infant at risk of autism.