Donald Winnicott

1
Donald Winnicott
2
Lived 1896 1971 in England. Eventually became
President of the British Psychoanalytic
Association. Variously described as a
pediatrician, psychiatrist, sociologist, and
psychoanalyst, who at one time gave various BBC
talks. Apart from a distinct way of describing
child development, he introduced the following
key terms holding environment, transitional
object, and the true- and false-self.
3
To start your evaluation of Winnicotts work you
need to grasp the imaginative simplification
which lies at the heart of his theorising, but
you also need some context for such work this
is supplied here by first making reference to
Freud the father of psychoanalysis and then
Piaget and Vygotsky two cognitive theorists
featuring on the Early Childhood Pathway.
4
For Freud, the limit case between the mind and
biological (physiological) instincts is set by
the mediating notion of the drive. Freud
indicates that human mental life is structured
around the consequences of a fundamental
contradiction in our biological make-up. On the
one side there are individual instincts that
are said to be selfish and self-preserving, while
on the other, there are others which have
developed to aid human survival within groups.
Maturation of the body involves maturation of the
instincts, and this is experienced in terms of
the strengthening, disappearance, or modification
of the drives as one ages.
5
Piaget emphasises the individuals exploratory
capacity in relation to his immediate
environment. For Piaget, the individuals
capacity to react to an environment changes
through this process of exploration so that the
individual, the individuals relationship to its
environment, and the nature of that environment
itself as experienced, becomes ever more complex.
Again, maturation forces the pace, and while the
readiness to explore ones environment may
diminish with age, its nature does not change.
Instead of the Freudian drives, Piaget argues
for the existence of mediating schemas for
interactions devoted to different forms of social
and individual survival.
6
Vygotsky the other, principal psychologist
studied within the Early Childhood Pathway,
places much greater emphasis on the importance of
language in social maturation. His main
contribution is to emphasise the significance of
educational discourse in which the child is
brought to re-assemble its existing knowledge
sometimes by incorporating new material through
its interaction with a more knowledgeable other
usually an adult. (Growth is said to take
place within a Zone of Proximal Development.)
Like Piaget, Vygotsky is more properly described
as a psychologist, rather than a psychoanalyst.
7
And so to Winnicott a psychoanalyst following
the Freudian system of theorising, rather than
cognitive science. Putting the matter of their
differences very crudely, while Piaget and
Vygotsky operate within a developing field of
science, both Freud and Winnicott operate
scientifically, but in a field of study that
lacks clearly defined objects. What I mean by
this is that both men theorise about the
unconscious largely by means of analogy,
metaphor, and the adaptation of ideas taken from
the arts and sciences, e.g. drama, mythology, but
also economics, physics, etc.
8
For Winnicott, then, the greatest mystery of
early childhood life is how children come to
recognise the meaningfulness of things - how, in
other words, they come to accept that their
entire experience is not only meaningful to them
but - by a process of mediation using abstract
symbols how they gain the ability to share
experiences with others. Clearly this involves
language, but Winnicotts focus is general he
wants to explain how we enter the symbolic world,
how we maintain ourselves within it, how we may
develop and, of course, being a psychoanalyst,
how such developments can go wrong.
9
This last point introduces a topic that has been
the focus of cultural critique in its own right.
Each theory of development attempts to represent
a process of normal development, and by
implication also says something about what
constitutes abnormal development. This falls
very much within the scope of Michel Foucaults
historical studies. My recommendation is rather
than reaching for his famous Discipline and
Punish typically cited in relation to education
you will find it more helpful to read his
Madness and Civilisation.
10
Its also helpful to know something about
Winnicotts initial research context- The group
of psychoanalysts he worked with during the
Forties and Fifties included John Bowlby the
father of what is now known as attachment
theory. During the Second World War, he was
employed as a consultant psychiatrist for the
evacuee programme. This involved predominantly
urban children being removed from their cities to
places of greater safety from bombing - usually
rural and small-town communities. Inevitably,
there were problems and it is these children who
were Winnicotts first patients.
11
There is a further aspect to this same context,
Winnicotts authority within British
psychoanalysis (based on the Tavistock Institute,
in London) resulted in him being invited by the
BBC throughout the Fifties to contribute to a
number of programmes discussing the desirable
conditions for child nurture. But by the
Sixties, feminist criticism was suggesting that
his emphasis on the importance of the mother had
been endorsed and adopted by the State for
propaganda purposes, rather than for its
scientific accuracy. The suggested rationale was
to persuade women to stay at home with their
children so as to free-up factory places for the
men who were returning home after the war.
12
A Holding Environment Winnicotts concept of the
good-enough mother assumes that she will
exercise what might be described as an ordinary
level of devotion and loving care. He identifies
this as the basic foundation for any childs
later psychological health. A central aspect of
this interaction between mother and child is what
Winnicott calls a holding environment. He
describes in unusual detail the processes by
which a baby is picked up, handled, bathed,
cleaned, played with, etc. all of which are
said to contribute to the babys first idea of
the mother.
13
Winnicott argues that the childs sense of its
own embodiment its recognition of its own body
as the place where its experiences are focussed
cannot develop adequately without an initial
period in which the experience of its own
unrecognised dependency is met by consistent
forms of loving handling. This allows the infant
to continue living within an illusion of its own
omnipotence until such time as it can begin to
interact with the environment unaided by the
mother. This, of course, entails a sometimes
extended period in which the mother must
progressively reduce the level of her own
interventions on the childs behalf.
14
Winnicott uses the concept of the holding
environment as a metaphor to explain a necessary
developmental pre-condition. He argues that as
the child develops, so too do its forms of
dependency. For normal development to take place
there has to be an equivalent to the infants
initial holding environment, only now this
holding is done by other carers, by siblings, by
the family, and eventually extended social
groups, such as school, university, and
work-place. (You might find certain novels
illuminating here, e.g., J. P. Hartleys The
Shrimp and the Anemone introduces a form of
sibling holding, Jeannette Wintersons Oranges
are not the Only Fruit introduces the embrace of
a committed social group, while Gunter Grass The
Tin Drum leads back to the Second World War and
an extraordinary version of holding.)
15
The Anti-Social Tendency An implication of
Winnicotts extended concept of holding is that
dependency itself must change with maturity, so
that the form of holding appropriate to one form
of dependency may no longer offer an adequate
form of holding in a new situation. Anti-social
behaviour is, at root, a cry for help - a search
for a new form of holding, and also an expression
of the sense of having lost a previously
successful social integration a lost balance
between need and response. Rather like Vygotsky,
Winnicott sees the value of creative play,
arguing that it offers the child a means to
constructs for itself a holding environment.
16
The Sense of Being the major driver of
Winnicottian theory Without an adequate initial
holding environment the childs sense of being
can be lost. This results in the development of a
false sense of being. The characteristic
feature of this will be various forms of docile
compliance relative to whichever holding
environment the child is currently experiencing.
Winnicotts diagnosis implies that the
development and maintenance of a true sense of
being will always result in a level of conflict
between individuals within the relevant holding
environment. (It may be helpful to compare this
with Rousseaus notion of amour-de-soi.)
17
Playing and Reality Winnicott describes initial
play as taking place in the potential space
between the baby and the mother figure the
quotes are here to remind you that for Winnicott
the structure of critical events in early infancy
give specific form to all subsequent developments
that are equivalent in kind. For instance, a
play situation refers to the good-enough
mothers readiness to initiate play with the
baby, and for the baby to recognise this
initiation as coming from a trusted mother
figure. Given the babys initially weak sense of
self, much depends on the nature of the mothers
responsiveness.
18
For Winnicott, then, the whole momentum of
development is dependent on the mothers
behaviour and attitude, and how this is expressed
will have a profound impact on all subsequent
development. The good-enough mother will be
consistently responsive to the infant, allowing
its sense of self to develop through an illusion
of omnipotence which she can at least temporarily
sustain. The true sense of self can only
flourish in such an environment, i.e., one which
relies on the mothers optimal responsiveness to
the infants expressions. (And, just to make the
point again, in relation to later forms of play,
creativity itself demands as a pre-requisite the
re-creation of a maternal environment.)
19
Transitional phenomena, creativity, and
reality. When playing within a holding
environment, Winnicott identifies a specific
feature which he terms the transitional object.
This is an object that is not-me, and yet not
not-me either! A familiar example would be the
favourite teddy bear or doll, etc. which the
child needs to an almost obsessive degree in
times of stress and almost always when going to
sleep. Winnicott argues that the transitional
object is the means by which the child copes with
separation and as the child develops, the
identification of its equivalent is a vital
ingredient in healthy development.
20
Like Vygotsky, Winnicott recognises the positive
and creative aspects of play, rather than just
its capacity to act as a form of
self-administered therapy for stress. In these
situations, it is the childs interpretative leap
into new holding environments that is at issue,
and the transitional object whether found or
self-made became the means by which the shock
of the new is mediated in a transitional space so
that the child can reach towards it from the
initial familiarities of its present holding
environment. For Winnicott, then, play leads to
creativity, and creativity leads to the opening
up of new possibilities and new ways of being.
21
Given the enormous importance of imitation in
human learning, what Winnicott has to say about
those situations when the transitional object
fails to materialise may seem odd. He argues
that just as in early infancy, where a false
sense of being is a constant developmental
danger, in play lacking a transitional object one
ends up with a child (or adult) making imitative
leaps that lack substance -silly or embarrassing
impersonations, assumed forms of maturity which
cannot be sustained, i.e., a form of infant
compliance. These comments seem Rousseauesque
think amour-propre - as does his view that a weak
sense of true being exposes one to the risk of
falling prey to the expectations of others.
22
Given the significance of the true self, it is
helpful to develop the concept a little further.
For Winnicott, the true self is close to that
residuum that even Locke recognised as marking
the essence of an individual, but Winnicott is
following Freud in this he wants to think of
this feature of the self as each individuals
unique patterning of the drives those limit
points of psychic life that Freud understood as
mediating between the mind and the instincts if
you like, we are dealing with the mental life
of the instincts. But note Winnicotts selection
of descriptive words he talks of integrity, and
uses phrases such as connected wholeness which
are said to characterise an authentic sense of
being alive.
23
Rousseaus Émile offers few grounds for
compromise until Émile becomes a self-sufficient
adult Winnicott is more flexible. He extends
the notion of the false-self so that it is used
to cope in a healthy way with the social
sacrifices that Freud writes about in his
Civilisation and its Discontents. A healthy
false self allows for social compromise without
risking the integrity of the true self. This
implies that in each situation there is a
continuum between the two kinds of self, and it
is the false sense which is a constant source of
danger. The false self presents a mask, or
persona (character) which attempts to anticipate
the demands made by the social situation on the
individual in order to maintain social position.
24
For infants, matters may be more serious. If the
mother is not good-enough, she is unable to
respond adequately to the individuality of her
infants needs and instead looks for the
reproduction of her own gestures, attitudes, etc.
Repeated compliance by the infant becomes the
grounds for a false sense of being starting to
dominate proceedings, i.e., the true sense of
self is swamped. If this happens, an entire set
of false social relations can be built up by the
child, and it may end with it living in a world
that lacks any possibility of individual reality
(experience gained through the childs true
self). The child grows up to be like its mother,
or whoever dominates the initial holding
environment at the time of the selfs
mis-direction.
25
http//changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysi
s/theorists/winnicott.htm http//mythosandlogos.c
om/Winnicott.html You might also find it useful
to use Google to investigate what is known as
Object-Relations theory particularly the
version developed by Melanie Klein. This was
judged by many to be eccentric, and stood in
opposition to the much more orthodox, Freudian
interpretation of childhood developed by Anna
Freud, Freuds daughter. Kleins work, however,
speculates in dramatic ways about some of the
earliest experiences of childhood it is,
literally, a cracking read!