Thinking About Children

Donald W. Winnicott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429922954
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Thinking About Children collects thirty-one papers, of which twenty-eight have never previously been published. As might be expected, they range widely in tone and content from concise clinical observations to more general meditations including the landmark paper "Towards an objective study of human nature". Of particular interest are sections on autism and psychosomatics, where the author's thinking can be seen to foreshadow more recent developments, such as Frances Tustin's work on autism. Together with a substantial introduction by the editors, this book indispensable for those acquainted with the author's work, and an ideal introduction for those who have not yet encountered the extraordinary clarity and depth of his thought.

Part one
Observation, Intuition, and Empathy

1
Towards an objective study of human nature

[1945]

You have invited me to speak to you on the subject of the background of psychology, its basic assumptions and discoveries. In order not to get lost in so large a subject, I must speak of the small part of it which comes my way; or, shall I say, I must be allowed to look at the whole from my particular angle.

I shall not be able to do what I ought to do, which is to take into consideration the fact that you yourselves who are listening to me come to the subject each from your own direction. Some of you think easily in terms of scientific experiment, others are used to being taught the facts, in so far as they are known, of history or geography; and among you there are some with strong intuitive bent, who like to approach any new subject subjectively at first, having ideas which you are unwilling to develop until you have stated them and recognized them as your own. I cannot cater for all this, so I shall go at it my own way.

I want to put before you the view that psychology simply means the study of human nature, and that it is a science, just as physics, physiology, and biology are sciences. This is my view, and my life’s work is based on this assumption, for I think you ought to know at the outset that I am not only a doctor but also a psychoanalyst.

Psychoanalysis has only recently become recognized as a serious subject. As a word it has now passed into common speech, and, as usual when this happens, it has come to mean something different when used popularly from what it means technically. If you were to ask a doctor just what part psychoanalysis is playing now in the general medical field, and in the whole study of human nature, you would be unlikely to get correct information. The tendency to examine the psychological factors of every case that can be found in medicine today is extremely new, and it will take a generation more before the work that has already been done by psychoanalysis will be fully applied in ordinary medical practice. Some of you will become doctors, and a few will probably wish to practise in that part of doctoring which particularly involves the study of the mind, and then you will need, in addition to the ordinary medical training, a training in the psychoanalytic technique; but you can be helped by such training even if you plan to do that most difficult of all medical jobs—to be a good family general practitioner.

Psychology makes no claim to priority in regard to the understanding of human nature, except in one respect: that is to say, in the making of this study a science. For instance, it is possible that everything that can be discovered by psychoanalysis can be shown to have been understood by Shakespeare, taking Shakespeare as a good example of someone with intuitive understanding, based, of course, on observation as well as on feeling or empathy. Each step forward that we make in the science of psychology enables us to see more in Shakespeare’s plays, just as it enables us to talk less foolishly about human nature. Talk we must, and psychology as a science justifies itself, in my opinion, if it enables us to talk less foolishly.

Also, it is not suggested that no psychological healing took place before psychoanalysis came on the field. Good doctors have always been good psychologists in so far as they could feel the patient’s position in his relation to external reality and also in his relation to his private inner world. But doctors, when they talk about human nature, say silly things just as other people do. Intuitive understanding of human nature must often prove unreliable as a guide in the more general field of social living. It might enable a doctor to be brilliantly understanding of a patient who was a thief, but unless the psychology of delinquency is studied as a science, intuitive understanding will not prevent doctors as well as other people from doing and saying all sorts of useless things when decisions have to be taken in a practical way, as, for instance, in a juvenile court.

The doctor’s long and arduous training does nothing to qualify him in psychology, and does much to disqualify him; it keeps him so busy from the age of 18 to 25 that he finds he is middle-aged before he has the leisure in which to discover himself. It takes him years of medical practice, and a struggle to find time to live his own life, before he can catch up on his fellow creatures, many of whom have lived a lot by the time they are 25.

Perhaps you are beginning to see that there is some point in making the study of human nature a science, a process characterized by observation of facts, by the building of theory and the testing of it, and by modification of theory according to the discovery of new facts. Can you see the one essential way in which science and intuition contrast with each other? True intuition can reach to a whole truth in a flash (just as faulty intuition can reach to error), whereas in a science the whole truth is never reached. What is important in science is a construction of a satisfactory road towards the truth. That is why a scientific training is so important for everybody; it enables you and me to test our own little bits of the world satisfactorily. Our feelings and our imaginings may get out of hand and may take us anywhere, this moment enabling us to dream we are able to fly and the next moment allowing us to feel infinitely unsupported, so that we fall and fall, and there is no bottom, except waking, which means a return to science, to the well-tested and welcome external reality.

Have you ever thought of science just in this way? If, in a subject that is being approached through the scientific method, there is a gap in our knowledge, we just record it as a gap in knowledge, a stimulus to research, but the intuitive person’s gaps are unknown quantities with somewhat terrifying potential. The physicists say that there is an element that we have not yet discovered. No one gets in a panic; later on the new element is found, and it fits into the scheme of things. When the drug “M&B”^* was discovered, no one knew why it acted in the way it did act, but no one suggested that its action was anything to do with magic; the biochemists simply felt stimulated by the fact of their ignorance, and they gradually found out more and more, but they still do not know all they want to know about it. In psychology there are many huge gaps in our knowledge. But, since psychology is a science, we do not even mind when the intuitive people say of something we have discovered, “We have always known that”; for they do not mention at the same time all the weird things they also knew, wrongly. The scientific approach to the phenomena of human nature enables us to be ignorant without being frightened, and without, therefore, having to invent all sorts of weird theories to explain away the gaps in knowledge.

You and I started as scientists when we were very young, in fact as soon as we were born. We started life as scientists provided we had good-enough mothering in the very early stages, so that we did not get pushed into a muddle. We were then at the mercy of our imaginings, and, as soon as we could perceive external reality, every real thing happening to us was welcome as depending on something external to ourselves, and therefore dependable, because of being something we could get to know. Even things that made us angry, like being kept waiting when we were hungry, had a value for us. External reality helped us to stand the magic quality of our ideas, which at that time were very primitive because we had so little experience of real things, and so we had nothing to dream about, only (one might say) feelings to feel. These magical primitive feelings can be indeed very alarming as well as wonderful, as we see from the study of those people who have not succeeded in coming to terms with them, and who are insane. Many people develop a scientific interest in external reality to get away from the intuitive and the subjective approach to life. I suppose Western culture, on the whole, tends towards an exclusion of feelings by scientific thinking, whereas in Eastern culture the scientific method is relatively despised. In the best of our Western culture we enjoy a scientific method of approach to external reality—whilst at the same time we preserve in music, painting, and poetry, and in religion, the recognition of the importance of the creative and intuitive approach to life, as well as the magic of primitive feeling and spontaneous instinctual expression.

Well, if we agree to all that, why not settle down to the scientific study of human nature? Why has psychology come at the end of the sciences, following biology, which, I suppose, could be said, in one sense, to have followed physics? (Of course, I know they co-exist today.)

Obviously the more closely connected a science is with life, the more difficult it is for a scientific approach to seem adequate. I remember my excitement in my own schooldays before the First World War when I first met Darwin’s Origin of Species. I could not leave off reading it.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez …

(Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”)

At the time I did not quite know why it was so important to me, but I see now that the main thing was that it showed that living things could be examined scientifically, with the corollary that gaps in knowledge and understanding need not scare me. For me this new idea meant a great lessening of tension and consequently a release of energy for work and play.

I feel sure that, if I were at school now, I should find the same value in the corresponding book that would put psychology on the map as a science, but I think there is no book exactly corresponding to the Origin of Species. No doubt the latter would be said now to contain many fallacies and misstatements, but the same could even more strongly be said of any one book dealing with psychology. Freud’s Introductory Lectures might be cited. There have been such tremendous advances, many of them Freud’s own, since Freud wrote this pioneer work, that a psychoanalyst might well hesitate before recommending even that one book, except to be read along with many others, and read with full knowledge that Freud was starting a new science. Freud’s works, read in chronological order, give a good picture of the way his ideas developed. He not only started a new science, but he also carried it a long way; and it is now being carried further by those who have continued to use his methods, and to develop them in their own ways.

Now let me say something about the difficulties inherent in the science of psychology. I shall begin by quoting what I said just now. I said that a scientific training was important because it enabled us to test our own little bit of the world satisfactorily. When it comes to psychology these words “our own little bit of the world” mean not only the phenomena of other people’s human nature but also our own. In this respect psychology is distinct from other sciences and must always remain so. With our minds we are examining the very minds we are using, and with our feelings we are examining our feelings. It is like trying to examine a microscope under its own high power. No wonder psychology came last in the sequence of sciences. Many people hold the view that psychology can never be a science because of this difficulty, and the impasse of (so-called) academic psychology illustrates the dilemma, but Freud went ahead in spite of this, and some of us think that he had already established psychology as a science at the beginning of this century. In The Interpretation of Dreams you will see how he showed that what most people regard as an insuperable barrier to psychology as a science could actually be turned to use in furthering scientific investigation. He realized that if he were to claim that he could use his patients’ dreams, believing in the significance of every detail recorded by the dreamer, he must show willingness and ability to examine his own dreams. Most of what Freud said about dreams was original and brilliantly constructive and has stood the test of time. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was another book in which he started to put before the public the possibility of a science of psychology, and there was a steady stream of scientific work from this great man. I was unaware when I was at school that these books were already written, and I doubt if I was ready for them then.

I now come to the main difficulty of psychology as a science, artd there Freud made his most important discovery. In no other science is there a twist corresponding to that produced in psychology by the existence of the unconscious. The word “unconscious” can, of course, mean the sort of thing that happens when you get a crack on the head and pass out. Psychologically the word had other meanings, and it has been used for a very long time to describe unawareness. For instance, one cannot, at any one moment in time, be aware of everything that one could theoretically be aware of. In painting, an artist may reach feelings of which he was unaware before he started, and which may come from so deep in his nature that he is hard put to it to acknowledge responsibility for his picture.

Freud was not daunted by the well-known fact that there are depths to our natures which we cannot easily plumb. He discovered and established by scientific method that there is a special variety of unconscious, which he named the repressed unconscious; here the trouble is not the depth of the thing of which the individual is unaware, but the fact that what is unconscious cannot be remembered because of its being associated with painful feeling or some other intolerable emotion. Energy has to be all the time employed in maintaining the repression, and it can easily be seen that if there is a great deal of an individual’s personality that is repressed, there is relatively little energy left for a direct participation in life. The first reason why people can get practical help from psychoanalytic treatment is that in so far as it is successful, it enables the patient to release painful material from repression, with the consequence that the patient has all that energy which formerly was used in the service of repression for the enjoyment of life and for constructive being.

Freud invented and developed a method, an instrument of scientific research into human nature which has turned out to be, at the same time, a method of treatment. Briefly described, psychoanalysis is: that the psychoanalyst prepares stable and simplified conditions in which the individual who undergoes psychoanalysis can let his mind work freely. Sooner or later he will be found to be approaching the difficult part of himself, showing in his relation to the analyst that he is wanting to relive even the episodes and types of emotional experience which for him are associated with so much pain that he is not able to reach them on his own. Thus growth that was held up can take place.

In the simplest possible example, a person who is being analysed is able to correct a past experience, or an imaginary experience, by reliving it in simplified conditions in which the pain can be tolerated because of its being spread over a period of time, taken, so to speak, in small doses, in a controlled emotional environment. As you can well imagine, in actual practice there is seldom anything as uncomplicated as this, but the main thing can legitimately be described in this way.

In a psychoanalytic treatment the analyst and the person being analysed are working together on a problem on equal terms. This makes the psychoanalytic method applicable to the treatment of many people who would not allow themselves to be totally in the power of another individual, even for a short period, as in treatment by hypnotism, even though by hypnotism it might be easier for a doctor to effect removal of symptoms. Freud’s invention, psychoanalysis, was more important than a mere treatment, for its aim was not primarily the removal of symptoms; its aim was a scientific one: to approach a little bit of truth for the sake of truth itself. Undoubtedly, one of the early good effects of the process is an indirect one, due to the fact that the person being analysed begins to feel that emotional phenomena can be examined scientifically, so that all the enormous gaps in his understanding of himself become just so many things not yet understood, instead of sources of anxiety and invitations for the construction of false theories and philosophies.

You will readily see that one important consequence of all this is that psychoanalysis rescues logic from the death to which it was fast sinking after a brilliant start. We can see now what was wrong with logic, and why it lacked social usefulness when it should have been able to make human behaviour more calculable and so strengthen the roots of society. It quickly got as far as it could ever get without taking into account the unconscious, the part of the personality of which the individual cannot become aware, and against awareness of which he must defend himself with all his power and skill.

Through psychoanalysis, insight is being gained into the causes of much that is unhealthy in persons and in society. At the same time through psychoanalysis there has come about an increased understanding of the development of man’s conscience, and also of his constructive or sublimatory potential, looked at as a compromise between instinctual drives and the demands of a mature and personal conscience. The compromise enables the individual to harness instinctual energy in a way that does not violate his relation to the social structure.

Incidentally, when investigation into neurosis is made it is always found that the blockage holding up emotional development has its origin in early childhood. It is at about the years of 2, 3, and 4, when the most intense interpersonal relationships are being experienced, that the most severe anxiety is roused. Anxiety leads to a setting up of defences in the individual and it is these organized defences that appear as ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE Observation, intuition, and empathy
• PART TWO Early infant development
• PART THREE The family
• PART FOUR Starting school
• PART FIVE Case studies and observations
• PART SIX Adoption
• PART SEVEN Psychosomatic problems
• PART EIGHT Autism and schizophrenia
• PART NINE Professional care of the growing child
• GLOSSARY OF MEDICAL TERMS
• ORIGINAL SOURCE OF EACH CHAPTER
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WINNICOTT’S WORKS
• INDEX