Donald W. Winnicott coined the phrase “good-enough” to describe the infant's relation to its environment The term is here extended to a discussion of the “good-enough” family in which the existential considerations implicit in Winnicott's work are critically joined to the anthropological views of Soren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Buber and Hans Walter Wolff. The purpose of this article is to develop a psychologically and theologically integrated foundation for understanding the role of the family, which is summarized by the developmental importance of what I have called the “family covenant of grace.”
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