The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development

Donald W. Winnicott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was trained in paediatrics, a profession that he practised to the end of his life, in particular at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital. He began analysis with James Strachey in 1923, became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1935, and twice served as its President. He was also a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the British Psychological Society. The collection of papers that forms The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment brings together Dr Winnicott's published and unpublished papers on psychoanalysis and child development during the period 1957-1963. It has, as its main theme, the carrying back of the application of Freud's theories to infancy. Freud showed that psycho-neurosis has its point of origin in the interpersonal relationships of the first maturity, belonging to the toddler age. Dr Winnicott explores the idea that mental hospital disorders relate to failures of development in infancy. Without denying the importance of inheritance, he has developed the theory that schizophrenic illness shows up as the negative of processes that can be traced in detail as the positive processes of maturation in infancy and early childhood.

Part One
Papers on Development

1
Psycho-Analysis and the Sense of Guilt¹ (1958)

In this lecture I shall reach to no more profound statement than that of Burke, who wrote two hundred years ago that guilt resides in the intention. The intuitive flashes of the great, however, and even the elaborate constructs of poets and philosophers, are lacking in clinical applicability; psycho-analysis has already made available for sociology and for individual therapy much that was previously locked up in remarks like this one of Burke.

A psycho-analyst comes to the subject of guilt as one who is in the habit of thinking in terms of growth, in terms of the evolution of the human individual, the individual as a person, and in relation to the environment. The study of the sense of guilt implies for the analyst a study of individual emotional growth. Ordinarily, guilt-feeling is thought of as something that results from religious or moral teaching. Here I shall attempt to study guilt-feeling, not as a thing to be inculcated, but as an aspect of the development of the human individual. Cultural influences are of course important, vitally important; but these cultural influences can themselves be studied as an overlap of innumerable personal patterns. In other words, the clue to social and group psychology is the psychology of the individual. Those who hold the view that morality needs to be inculcated teach small children accordingly, and they forgo the pleasure of watching morality develop naturally in their children, who are thriving in a good setting that is provided in a personal and individual way.

I shall not need to examine variations in constitution. We have indeed no clear evidence that any individual who is not mentally defective is constitutionally incapable of developing a moral sense. On the other hand, we do find all degrees of success and failure in the development of a moral sense. I shall attempt to explain these variations. Undoubtedly there are children and adults with a defective guilt-sense, and such defect is not specifically linked with intellectual capacity or incapacity.

It will simplify my task if I divide my examination of the problem into three main parts:

• (1) The sense of guilt in those individuals who have developed and established a capacity for guilt-feeling.
• (2) The sense of guilt at the point of its origin in individual emotional development.
• (3) The sense of guilt as a feature conspicuous by its absence in certain individual persons.

At the end I shall refer to the loss and recovery of the capacity for guilt-sense.

1. A Capacity for Sense of Guilt Assumed

How does the concept of guilt appear in psycho-analytic theory? I think I am right in saying that the early work of Freud in this field had to do with the vicissitudes of guilt-sense in those individuals in whom a capacity for guilt-sense could be taken for granted. I will therefore say something about Freud’s view of the meaning of guilt for the unconscious in health, and the psychopathology of guilt-sense.

The work of Freud shows how it is that true guilt resides in the intention, in unconscious intention. Actual crime is not the cause of guilt-feeling; rather is it the result of guilt—guilt that belongs to criminal intention. Only legal guilt refers to a crime; moral guilt refers to inner reality. Freud was able to make sense of this paradox. In his early theoretical formulations he was concerned with the id, by which he referred to the instinctual drives, and the ego, by which he referred to that part of the whole self that is related to the environment. The ego modifies the environment in order to bring about id-satisfactions, and it curbs id-impulses in order that what the environment can offer can be used to best advantage, again for id-satisfaction. Later (1923) Freud used the term superego to name that which is accepted by the ego for use in id-control.

Freud is here dealing with human nature in terms of economics, and deliberately simplifying the problem for the purpose of founding a theoretical formulation. There is an implied determinism in all this work, an assumption that human nature can be examined objectively and can have applied to it the laws that are known to apply in physics. In ego-id terms the sense of guilt is very little more than anxiety with a special quality, anxiety felt because of the conflict between love and hate. Guilt-sense implies tolerance of ambivalence. It is not difficult to accept the close relationship between guilt and the personal conflict that arises out of coincident loving and hating, but Freud was able to trace the conflict to its roots and to show that the feelings are those associated with the instinctual life. As is now well known, Freud found in analysis of adults (neurotic rather than psychotic) that he regularly came back to the early childhood of the patient, to intolerable anxiety, and to the clash of love and hate. In the simplest possible terms of the Oedipus complex, a boy in health achieved a relationship with his mother in which instinct was involved and in which the dream contained an in-love relationship with her. This led to the dream of the death of the father, which in turn led to the fear of the father and the fear that the father would destroy the child’s instinctual potential. This is referred to as the castration-complex. At the same time there was the boy’s love of the father and his respect for him. The boy’s conflict between that side of his nature which made him hate and want to harm his father, and the other side by which he loved him, involved the boy in a sense of guilt. Guilt implied that the boy could tolerate and hold the conflict, which is in fact an inherent conflict, one that belongs to healthy life.

This is all quite simple, except that only through Freud has it been recognized that in health the climax of anxiety and guilt has a date; that is to say, has a first vitally important setting—the small child with biologically-determined instincts living in the family and experiencing the first triangular relationship. (This statement is purposely simplified, and I shall not make any reference here to the Oedipus complex in terms of sibling-relationships, nor any statement of the equivalent to the Oedipus complex in a child brought up away from the parents or in an institution.

In the early psycho-analytic statement there is but little reference to the destructive aims in the love impulse, or to the aggressive drives that only in health become fully fused with the erotic. All this needed eventually to be brought into the theory of the origin of guilt, and I shall examine such developments later. In the first statement guilt arises out of the clash of love and hate, a clash which is inevitable if loving is to include the instinctual element that belongs to it. The prototype has reality at the toddler age.

All psycho-analysts are familiar in their work with the replacement of symptoms by the more normal development, a sense of guilt, and an increased consciousness and acceptance of the content of the fantasy which makes the sense of guilt logical. How illogical the sense of guilt can seem! In Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy there is a good collection of cases illustrating the absurdities of guilt-feeling. In long and deep analysis patients feel guilt about anything and everything, and even about early environmental adverse factors that we can easily discern as chance phenomena. Here is a simple illustration:

A boy of eight became increasingly anxious, and eventually ran away from school. He was found to be suffering from an unbearable sense of guilt because of the death of a sibling that took place some years prior to his own birth. He had recently heard about this, and the parents had no idea that he was disturbed by the news. In this case it was not necessary for the boy to have a long analysis. In a few therapeutic interviews he discovered that the crippling sense of guilt which he felt about this death was a displacement from the Oedipus complex. He was a fairly normal boy, and with this amount of help he was able to return to school, and his other symptoms cleared up.

The Superego

The introduction of the concept of the superego (1923) was a big step forward in the inevitably slow evolution of psychoanalytical metapsychology. Freud had done the pioneer work himself, bearing the brunt when the world was disturbed by his drawing attention to the instinctual life of children. Gradually other workers gained experience through the use of the technique, and Freud had many colleagues by the time he used the term superego. With his new term, Freud was indicating that the ego, in coping with the id, employed certain forces which were worthy of a name. The child gradually acquired controlling forces. In the over-simplification of the Oedipus complex, the boy introjected the respected and feared father, and therefore carried about with him controlling forces based on what the child perceived and felt about this father. This introjected father-figure was highly subjective, and coloured by the child’s experiences with father-figures other than the actual father and by the cultural pattern of the family. (The word introjection simply meant a mental and emotional acceptance, and this term avoids the more functional implications of the word incorporation.) A sense of guilt therefore implies that the ego is coming to terms with the superego. Anxiety has matured into guilt.

Here in the concept of the superego can be seen the proposition that the genesis of guilt is a matter of inner reality, or that guilt resides in the intention. Here also lies the deepest reason for guilt-feeling related to masturbation and the autoerotic activities generally. Masturbation in itself is no crime, yet in the total fantasy of masturbation is gathered together all the conscious and unconscious intention.

From this very much simplified statement of the psychology of the boy, psycho-analysis could begin to study and examine the development of the superego in both boys and girls, and also the differences that undoubtedly exist in the male and female in regard to superego formation, in the pattern of conscience, and in the development of a capacity for guilt-feeling. Out of the concept of the superego a great deal has developed. The idea of the introjection of the father-figure has turned out to be too simple. There is an early history of the superego in each individual: the introject may become human and father-like, but in earlier stages the superego introjects, used for control of id-impulses and id-products, are subhuman, and indeed are primitive to any degree. Thus we find ourselves studying guilt-sense in each individual infant and child as it develops from crude fear to something akin to a relationship to a revered human being, one who can understand and forgive. (It has been pointed out that there is a parallel between the maturing of the superego in the individual child and the development of monotheism as depicted in early Jewish history.)

All the time while conceptualizing the processes which underlie the sense of guilt we are keeping in mind the fact that the sense of guilt, even when unconscious and even when apparently irrational, implies a certain degree of emotional growth, ego health, and hope.

The Psycho-pathology of Guilt-sense

It is common to find people who are burdened by a sense of guilt and indeed hampered by it. They carry it round like the load on the back of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress. We know that these people have a potentiality for constructive effort. Sometimes when they find a suitable opportunity for constructive work the sense of guilt no longer hampers them and they do exceptionally well; but a failure of opportunity may lead to a return of guilt-feeling, intolerable and inexplicable. We are dealing here with abnormalities of the superego. In a successful analysis of individuals who are oppressed by a sense of guilt, we find a gradual lessening of this burden. This lessening of the burden of guilt-feeling follows the lessening of repression, or the approach of the patient towards the Oedipus complex and an acceptance of responsibility for all the hate and love that this involves. This does not mean that the patients lose the capacity for a sense of guilt (except in so far as in some cases there may have been a false superego development based in an abnormal way on the intrusion of a very powerful authoritarian influence derived from the environment of early years).

We can study these excesses of guilt-feeling in individuals who pass for normal, and who indeed may be among the most valuable members of society. It is easier, however, to think in terms of illness, and the two illnesses that must be considered are melancholia and obsessional neurosis. There is an inter-relationship between these two illnesses, and we find patients who alternate between one and the other.

In obsessional neurosis, the patient is always trying to put something right; but it is quite clear to all observers, and perhaps to the patient, that there will be no success. We know that Lady Macbeth cannot undo the past and get away from her evil intentions by washing her hands. In obsessional neurosis we sometimes get a ritual which is like a caricature of a religion, as if the God of the religion were dead or temporarily unavailable. Obsessive thinking may be a feature whereby every attempt is made to annul one idea by another, but nothing succeeds. Behind the whole process is a confusion, and no amount of tidying that the patient can do alters this confusion, because it is maintained; it is unconsciously maintained in order to hide something very simple; namely, the fact that, in some specific setting of which the patient is unaware, hate is more powerful than love.

I will cite the case of a girl who could not go to the seaside because she saw in the waves someone crying out for help. Intolerable guilt made her go to absurd lengths in arranging for vigilance and rescue. The absurdity of the symptom could be shown by the fact that she could not tolerate even a picture postcard of the sea coast. If she saw one by chance in a shop-window she would have to find out who took the photograph, because she would see someone drowning, and she would have to organize relief, in spite of the fact that she knew perfectly well that the photograph was taken months and even years previously. This very ill girl was able eventually to come through to a fairly normal life, much less hampered by irrational guilt-feeling; but the treatment was necessarily of long duration.

Melancholia is an organized form of the depressed mood to which almost all people are liable. A melancholic patient may be paralysed by a sense of guilt, and may sit for years accusing himself or herself of causing the world war. No argument has any effect whatever. When it is possible to carry out an analysis of such a case, it is found that this gathering into the self of guilt for all the people in the world gives way in the treatment to the patient’s fear that hate will be greater than love. The illness is an attempt to do the impossible. The patient absurdly claims responsibility for general disaster, but in so doing avoids reaching his or her personal destructiveness.

A little girl of five reacted with a deep depression to the death of her father which took place in unusual circumstances. The father had bought a car at a time when the little girl was going through a phase in which she was hating her father as well as loving him. She was, in fact, having dreams of his death, and when he proposed a car ride she implored him not to go. He insisted on going, as would be natural since children are liable to these nightmares. The family went for a ride, and it happened that they had an accident; the car was turned over and the little girl was the only one who was uninjured. She went up to her father who was lying in the road and kicked him to wake him up. But he was dead. I was able to watch this child through her serious depressive illness in which she had almost total apathy. For hours she stood in my room and nothing happened. One day she kicked the wall very gently with the same foot that she had used to kick her dead father to wake him up. I was able to put into words her wish to wake her father whom she loved, though in kicking him she was also expressing anger. From that moment of her kicking the wall she gradually came back into life, and after a year or so was able to return to school and to lead a normal life.

It was possible to have an intuitive understanding of unexplained guilt and of obsessional and melancholic illnesses apart from psycho-analysis. It is probably true,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Editorial Note
• Introduction
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Part One: PAPERS ON DEVELOPMENT
• Part Two: THEORY AND TECHNIQUE
• Bibliography I: Books and Papers Referred to in the text
• Bibliography II: Editor’s List of Author’s Publications (1926–1964)
• Index