Winnicott, Early Crisis, and the Buried True Self

Popular meme of two slides—"Well-behaved child" and "Smartest in class"—both ending in “Existential crisis at 25."

By Reuven Kotleras on June 29, 2025

Resident Bright Insight Blogger, Reuven Kotleras, is a profoundly gifted ex-child and polymath. He has published professionally on European political history, Eurasian economic development, epistemology of science, and mathematical logic, among other topics. His skills include decision analysis, organizational design, and strategic foresight. He is also a poet, pianist, runner, and dog-lover.

Winnicott, Early Crisis, and the Buried True Self

There is an Internet meme that is an image of a bifurcated playground slide, two separate chutes converging into a single dead end at the bottom. Superimposed on the left slide is the phrase “Being a well-behaved child,” and on the right, “Being the smartest guy in class.” Both trajectories, however distinct in their initial conditioning—one through docility, the other through precocity—inevitably terminate in the same caption affixed to the bottom of the slide: “Existential crisis at 25.”

This signifies that for most people, childhood is a phase of performative adaptation—either obedient or high-achieving, during which the external system seems to reward compliance and visible excellence. According to this schema, adulthood begins when that system stops responding to those same adaptations, and the strategies that once worked start to feel hollow. Around age 25, this culminates in what is popularly recognized as an existential crisis: a delayed collapse, the moment when the old modes no longer function and the individual is forced to reckon with the deeper questions of identity and purpose.

Thus, the humorous meme is quietly brutal, as it reduces two seemingly divergent adaptive strategies in childhood to a single psychological outcome in early adulthood, economically capturing the collapse of instrumental success into ontological disorientation. It thus suggests that neither social conformity nor intellectual distinction offers insulation from the deeper crises of meaning that arise once their utility wanes.

Disruption of the Expected Developmental Arc

For me, however, that sequence was radically compressed and rearranged. In my case, this did not happen at age 25, because it happened at age 15–16, when I had already entered a system that neither nurtured nor buffered my age-specific developmental needs. This meant that I confronted what the meme portrays as a “gifted double-bind” far earlier than most. My sixteenth birthday occurred three months after I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman.

My arrival at MIT at such a young age abruptly shattered the illusion that either “being a well-behaved child” or “being the smartest guy in the class”—and I was often both—was sufficient or even particularly meaningful. At the same time, I was denied the social scaffolding that a peer of the same chronological age might have relied upon to make sense of isolation, asymmetrical development, or emergent ambiguity over personal identity. This phase, rather than the gradual slide into adulthood that the meme posits, was the fracture.

As a result, I experienced not a delayed existential reckoning but an early existential discontinuity. This confluence of factors forced me to construct an inner philosophy of meaning long before others my age, portrayed in the meme as still on the slides, would even have begun to sense the need for one. I had to metabolize disillusionment and ontological solitude as a middle-adolescent, indeed for idiosyncratic reasons even as an early adolescent before entering MIT—rather than as an adult. From the age of 13–14, when I was in tenth or eleventh grade, I was already immersing myself in questions of purpose, coherence, and existential grounding through the reading of classics in philosophy and psychology.

The Gifted Double-Bind and Loss of Structure

The meme’s implicit structure assumes linear accommodation until deferred implosion: first, childhood, marked by such adaptive behaviors as compliance, achievement, and/or performance; then, adulthood, which no longer rewards those strategies; and finally, a reckoning at age 25. But I encountered no such arc. At fifteen, I entered an institutional environment that neither recognized nor buffered the developmental specificity of that age. The result was not deferred disillusionment but an immediate, structural dislocation.

What followed was not the slow unmooring implied by the meme, but instead an early-onset confrontation with what some call the “gifted double-bind.” All the instruments of my childhood and early adolescent socialization—daily family life, public school, and three networks of radio wave–transmitted television (there was no peer group or religious institution, and also no Internet) mainly vanished. The emotional, interpersonal, or epistemic scaffolding that could translate my precocity into coherence had collapsed. The mismatch between my internal tempo and the institutional rhythms around me was accentuated as I lacked any social grammar for sense-making.

In that vacuum, I began assembling what others would not need for another decade: an interior framework, a teleonomic axis, and a philosophy of self-continuity that was not borrowed from others but rather built from necessity. Ontological solitude and disillusionment were not late arrivals but companions of my freshman and much of my sophomore year.

A Crisis Faced Before the Question Arose

The meme’s framing of an “existential crisis at 25” thus presumes a trajectory that I never travelled. What it labels as collapse was, in my case, an event through which I had already lived and which I had already metabolized years earlier. I did not slide into adulthood along a gentle curve; I was dropped into a chasm of abstraction and underdeveloped social context. This produced a discontinuous intensification of self-awareness together with a rupture with normative developmental pacing. The combined effects set me, quite abruptly, into a different kind of interior motion.

By the time others were stumbling into the question, “What am I (here) for?” I had long since asked and answered it by articulating already a continuity between past and future. I had already internalized a lifelong project, forming a teleonomic drive, an inner sense of directedness grounded not in external expectations but in self-organized purpose. Alongside this, I had a sense of historical and conceptual continuity that gave shape to my inner world.

Most crucially, I had constructed a way of thinking and organizing experience that allowed me to project meaning forward even in the absence of immediate validation or clear reward. By the time I was 25, I was already four years into my graduate-school career, on the verge of defending the prospectus for my doctoral dissertation. While others found themselves at age 25 still hovering on the edge of adulthood, I had already disappeared underground, excavated concepts, and built silent tunnels through which meaning would flow.

Rebuilding Meaning Through Internal Coherence

Although I certainly did not conceive this process in systemic terms at the time, in retrospect it may be expressed in the following manner. My structural environment was not necessarily much different from that of the child in the meme, but my internal architecture began to take on other forms. What emerged was reinforced by a recursive narrative agency, and later by an inclination toward symbolic system-building. Although the latter would become more explicit only after the fact, still I found ways to cultivate a meta-cognitive fluency and develop narrational agency. These enabled me to witness the self’s own unfolding across time.

As this internal architecture took shape, the framing of experience became more layered. Through a slowly emerging dimensional awareness, I began to re-enter earlier developmental phases with re-interpretive capacity. Past events and conditions could be revisited and re-situated, whereby I recovered a degree of agency, and concomitant interpretive power, that had not been available at the time. This recursive movement made it possible to perceive discontinuities not simply as chaos or failure, but as elements within a larger intelligible structure. The early fragmentation, though not undone, could be symbolically re-threaded.

The earlier, fragmented threads could now be symbolically rewoven into a high-level integrative framework. In that re-threading, I began to act as agent, analyst, and cartographer together. This triple function allowed me to begin shaping previously unstructured material into an integrative framework that gave form to what had once been a silent collapse. And that facility effectively transformed the crisis space into a generative grammar.

Winnicott’s Framework: True Self, False Self, and Suppression

It is useful to look at all this from the perspective of D.W. Winnicott's famous distinction between a “true self” and a “false self”—in his book chapter, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment (1960)—that was later taken up even more famously by R.D. Laing. From Winnicott’s standpoint, what unfolded in me was not simply an early crisis of identity but a structural sequence involving the emergence, suppression, and eventual re-emergence of the true self. In early childhood, the conditions were present for that true self to take form. My relationship with my mother, attuned and unintrusive, provided what Winnicott termed a “good enough” environment: one in which spontaneous gestures of being could unfold without distortion. That early lived authenticity really existed; it was not idealized.

But as the family dynamic destabilized, particularly through increasing paternal intrusions and irrationality, in the context of the unspoken tensions of a cohabiting marital breakdown, the ecology supporting that authenticity collapsed. What followed was not just defensive behavior but a reconfiguration. The false self, in Winnicott’s terms, is not a mask but a structural defense, a relationally compelled adaptation that preserves the core by concealing it. I didn’t lose the true self. Rather, I buried it, whether consciously or not, because the environment could no longer accommodate it.

Entering MIT at age fifteen did not dismantle the false self so much as render it less necessary. Although the institution did not offer any environment to replace what had been held in the family-of-origin context, it indirectly made space for the re-emergence of the true self. Leaving the pathogenic context of the family of origin lifted the requirement for concealment. Slowly, the true self began to manifest again, not dramatically, but in the quiet restoration of inner continuity, in spontaneous thought, in unguarded expression, and in the gradual cessation of performative coherence.

The Secret Life and the Return of the True Self

Even through the years of the false self’s dominance, there were residues of the true self in private thought, in voracious reading, in the solitary play of mind, in creative writing: that is, in what Winnicott called the “secret life.” The true self had persisted, dormant but intact, in places unshared with others. This persistence was crucial and it is why the subsequent rupture was survivable. The false self was adaptive, not pathological, and it began to dissolve when it was no longer required.

Indeed, when during my freshman year I began to read Laing's The Divided Self, it was revelatory, although it took me years to understand precisely why. And for years I regarded the book almost like a bible, again without fully knowing why. Finally, later on, I understood: it was because it was in reading The Divided Self, that I came to understand—without understanding that I understood—that I was not schizophrenic, and that to the degree that I was schizoid, this had begun the process of at least partial healing.

Representative of this process is my distinct memory of realizing, just over halfway through my freshman year, that I actually had the option of running down the stairs and out into the street, screaming. Yet when I actually considered doing so, I decided against it because I reasoned that it seemed highly unlikely to solve any problem that I was experiencing, and indeed appeared to risk creating more problems instead.

Coda

Looking back, what took place was not a failure of development. It was, rather, an early encounter—albeit without the concepts or companionship that might have made it easier to understand at the time—with something most gifted children seem to face much later. What is now evident, through the use of Winnicott’s language, is that this was never just a personal detour. It was a structural adaptation to an environment that could not hold what had once, earlier, freely emerged. The self that went underground was not lost; it remained intact: waiting, observing, finding ways to stay alive in the margins, until the moment came when it no longer needed to hide. Recognizing this does not diminish the cost, but it does make the shape of the journey intelligible, which is itself reparative.