Ruthless Winnicott

The role of ruthlessness in psychoanalysis and political protest

Sally Swartz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138345485
• eBook ISBN: 9780429791543
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Ruthless Winnicott is an extended exploration of the role of ruthlessness in psychic development. That survival is of no use unless it is preceded by a ruthless attack is one of D. W. Winnicott's most resonant paradoxes. The book links this with the search for subjective freedom for those traumatized by colonialism, and in doing so draws on the work of Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary psychoanalytic thinker Frantz Fanon.

Sally Swartz examines essential pieces of Winnicott's work on ruthlessness as central to the emergence of concern for the Other. She illustrates, with clinical examples, ways in which the ruthless use of the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic space allows the patient either to enter fully into a process that allows growth, or to defend ruthlessly against the anxieties provoked by psychic change. Ruthless Winnicott also maps decolonial challenges to psychoanalytic theory, and the role of ruthlessness in protest movements demanding radical subjective change. Swartz's exploration of ruthlessness as both zest and defense in individual development and in protest movements illuminates processes of psychological collision and change. It traces links between individual trauma and collective turbulence, and maps ways in which ruthlessness is essential to subjective change.

Ruthless Winnicott will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars of colonialism, decolonization and post-colonialism.

Chapter 1

We want to be eaten

In “The Depressive Position in Normal Development,” Winnicott makes a simple statement about the analyst’s position: “We want to be eaten, not magically introjected.” He goes on: “There is no masochism in this. To be eaten is the wish and indeed the need of a mother at a very early stage in the care of an infant” (Winnicott, 2002, p. 276).¹ To be eaten is to provide food for growth, to allow for digestion and expulsion. This underwrites transformation and the possibility of seeking enlivenment beyond simple physical survival.

The opposite of being eaten is not to be taken in as food, but to be used as a charm against hunger, a temporary balm in the form of an idealized and potentially addictive presence. “We hate to become internalized good breasts in others, and to hear ourselves being advertised by those whose own inner chaos is being precariously held by the introjection of an idealized analyst” (Winnicott, 2002, p. 276). For an analyst or psychoanalytic psychotherapist to be “eaten, worn down, stolen from” by a ruthless patient, and to survive, opens the way for a new form of relatedness. As Winnicott describes in “Primitive Emotional Development,” it creates externality, “puts the brakes on” – allows freedom from – the magical world of fantasy, hallucination; it creates two, where before there was one, and in the survival of both negotiation might begin (Winnicott, 2002, p. 153; for a rich exploration of negotiation specifically in relation to paradox, see also Pizer, 2013).

For the infant to eat in the way Winnicott describes demands ruthlessness, in the sense that it is pitiless, without concern for effects. To mistake the infant as intending ruthlessness is to attribute a capacity for relationality that belongs to a later stage of development. To be ruthless is also not simply to be pitiless; in its full-throated demand, and in its expression, it embodies a vigorous act of trust. It is shamelessly naked, exposing the rawness of need as it is felt.

In “Hate in the Countertransference,” Winnicott talks of the infant treating the mother “as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave” (Winnicott, 2002, p. 201). Holding hatred “without doing anything about it,” particularly without retaliating, requires in itself a form of ruthlessness, this time the mother’s. Tolerance is too passive a word to describe the quality of survival to be summoned while being used ruthlessly. It requires putting much else aside. Strong feeling has to be both contained and kept alive. The infant cannot use an emotionally absent or overwhelmed or terrified mother ruthlessly. Total presence is essential to survival of both mother and infant as a unit, and this, Winnicott argues, is possible because there is joy just as deep and wide and engulfing as the state of being worn thin. When Winnicott states that this is not masochistic, he refers to the unit living through and surviving an arduous experience together, without abdication, abnegation of self or enslavement to pain. And then there will be times during which quiet and sensual pleasure has joyously been achieved.

Survival of ruthlessness creates the quality of “ruth,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the quality of being compassionate; the feeling of sorrow for another.” Ruth implies the capacity to see the other, to experience the other as separate from oneself. For Winnicott, this early experience of ruth is inextricable from the destructiveness: ruth is compassion specifically for the other used ruthlessly in the service of survival. It is a “queer kind of truth” (Winnicott, 1989, p. 91).

We want to be eaten. Patients who are able to use us ruthlessly come to therapy to feed and be fed, all in the service of reaching beyond withdrawal from or persecution by an internal world made too present by a failure to survive. Winnicott suggests that to offer ourselves for eating in this way demands that we put aside our own preoccupations and ways of experiencing time. We are being asked to dream our patients, even when their capacity to dream might be damaged (Eigen, 2001, p. 65; Ogden, 2014, pp. 2–13). They will plunge deep and take us with them. It requires what Eigen refers to as “an area of faith” (Eigen, 1981, p. 413), or what Ghent calls “surrender” (Ghent, 1990, p. 108).

Winnicott put the word “ruthless” to work in two different ways. One signals absence of concern, which developmentally has not yet made its appearance. In “Psychoanalysis and the Sense of Guilt,” he writes, “In analysis one could say ‘couldn’t care less’ gives way to guilt-feeling” (Winnicott, 1965, p. 24). He refers in this to demand that does not yet take account of its cost. This use of the term might best be translated as zest, wholeheartedness or vigour. But Winnicott talks also of something more than careless zest; aggression is also at play, and will remain so, even after the establishment of concern, and the ability to separate destructiveness in fantasy from attacks on the loved and surviving “environment mother” (Lucente, 1998; Winnicott, 1965, p. 183). In that he considers it to be instinctual, he has accurately been taken to task for “valorization of hate, ruthlessness, and destruction” (Orange, 2011, p. 168).

In the chapters that follow, I will keep alive both threads of Winnicott’s definition of ruthlessness. I will make the argument that defensive ruthlessness has a quality quite different to vigour or zest or wholehearted surrender. On the one hand, there is the possibility of zestful surrender to the vulnerability of “unfreezing”; on the other, a determination to prevent unfreezing, and to attack the therapist for attempting it. This book is about many permutations of ruthlessness across the range of both its meanings. Failure of ruth is sometimes temporary, sometimes enduring, and carried into cycles of deadness, compliance, dissociation or attack. Ruthless pursuit of survival is common to both preservation of the original failure and subsequent thinness of concern, but also, in the right context, a reach for a new beginning.

“Hullo object!” “I destroyed you.” “I love you.” The creation of externality

In “Hate in the Countertransference,” Winnicott outlines a number of reasons why a mother hates her infant “from the word go.” The infant is free of worry for the mother’s safety, mental health, need for sleep or need for the baby’s cooperation in representing her as competent to the outside world. Not only is there dependence; there is an innocent disregard for what might be needed to make her feel good about herself. “His excited love is cupboard love, so that having got what he wants he throws her away like orange peel . . . He is suspicious, refuses her good food, and makes her doubt herself, but eats well with his aunt” (Winnicott, 2002, p. 201).

This baby demands that needs be met, and as time is frozen the needs are always urgent. The baby makes demands that tax the mother beyond her capacity to hold herself and to keep her own needs in mind. She must turn to others to have awareness of her needs. She is a slave, but her servitude puts at bay thoughts of her baby as her owner, her sovereign. She is, in her state of slavery, and for a time, she is her baby’s thoughts, and the baby’s needs are hers. The baby must be innocent, too, of the feelings stirred in her: “At first he does not know what she does or what she sacrifices for him. Especially he cannot allow for her hate” (Winnicott, 2002, p. 201). In order to preserve this ruthless use of herself, she must protect the baby from the kinds of “coincidences” that might bring doubt, catastrophic for being too early to bear. These might include physical pain in her absence or turbulence inside the mother caused by her ongoing life, separate from the baby. In other words, the baby must be sheltered from the kinds of everyday events that might prevent the caregiver from providing for a fretful child needing a sleep or a feed.

Given the stakes, survival of both the mother and the baby through the stage of ruthless need is an achievement and a labour. For the baby, ruthlessness received and survived paves the way for psychic aliveness, a faith that physical and psychological needs, however extreme and frightening, will be seen and attended to. This in turn allows time to unfreeze, so that there is space to imagine a future time, minutes or hours away, in which the vortex will be still. Negotiation becomes a possibility.

For the mother or caregiver, fuddled by lack of sleep, afflicted by anxiety and guilt when the baby is handed over to someone else so that laundry or grocery shopping might be done, there is relief and fury that she herself is at stake, even though she sometimes feels that she is hanging on by a thread. Along the way, there are moments of quiet, smiles and babbling, skin-on-skin togetherness. Joy, then, is as extreme as despair once was. Remarkably, these jewelled moments of pleasure are sufficient to see the dark nights through.

For Winnicott, survival of ruthless demand in the mother/baby unit is not simply a matter of time passing. It is not mechanical, because it is predicated on overwhelming and disorganizing affect that threatens going-on-being for both. It is not mechanical, because it is fully alive, and insists that feelings be felt. It is essential that the experience is lived together (Ogden, 2012, p. 90; Winnicott, 2002, p. 152). The baby begins to take something about survival for granted: that there is a going-on-being to be surrendered to and relied upon. Time opens too for the mother: she begins to attach in a new way to herself. Her interests broaden. She reads the newspaper occasionally, and relishes an hour of shopping alone.

The baby is not yet able to conceive of caring about the mother’s survival, so that attacks are not for the purpose of destruction, and yet Winnicott insists not only that destruction occurs, but that it must occur. Destroyed is the baby’s omnipotent control of the mother, as the baby “has doubts about himself” (Winnicott, 2002, p. 201). Destroyed also is the merged mother, the always-there failing, supplying, surviving mother. The mother, having been destroyed over and over as she carries her infant through early need, lets go at last of two things: her belief in the permanence of the unit itself, and then her belief in herself as omnipotently in charge of her baby’s thriving. After living ruthlessness together, neither mother nor baby will be the same again. Failures are at times devastating, and a source of great anxiety. How they are managed will be critical to everything that follows.

Attempts at repair, reconstitution of the emerging in-and-out subject/object, are rendered as ruth, concern. Repair becomes a lifelong task. Crucially, ruth and ruthlessness, with all the implicit destruction and recreation, assertion, demand, forgiveness and compassion, are more than simple developmental events. As they recur, they are what makes feeling alive possible.

Imagine a child, 3 years old. She has a set of tiny teacups made from acorn cups and dried halves of orange skin. With ferocious concentration, she makes tea for the family – water, a little sand instead of sugar, some aloe juice for flavour. She stirs each potion with great care. Enormously pleased with her creation, she offers a cup to each person: “A lovely cup of tea for you!” mimicking her father’s voice. She watches closely to make sure that tea is taken. Here is a glorious mixture of ruthlessness and concern. Her potion must be swallowed; she commands this, and no fobbing off will do. There is doubt too: will her tea be enjoyed? And into this gesture of hospitality is poured her understanding of a whole ritual of give and take, feeding and eating. There is both ruthlessness in the demand and concern for its effects.

This is perhaps Winnicott’s most resonant paradox, one that has been the source of important revisioning of object relations theory (Benjamin, 2017; Eigen, 2001; Ogden, 2012; Pizer, 2013; Slochower, 2013). Survival is of no use unless it is preceded by a ruthless attack, an imagined destruction. It does far more than underwrite survivability itself. A death allows a recurring rebirth, and a pair where once there was one. It creates space between mother and baby, builds the capacity to experience a separate self, to use aloneness as a freedom, and to entertain murderous thoughts without assuming they will actually kill. Survival, happening as a result of destruction, and in cycles, constitutes the self as separate from the other, constructs point of view (what I see is not what you see), and begins to scaffold tolerance of ambiguity and contradiction. It sorts out the muddle between the baby’s spontaneous gesture and the mother’s receiving of it: from now on, the baby has a new sense of ownership of what comes from within. “Projective mechanisms assist in the act of noticing what is there, but are not the reason why the object is there” (Winnicott, 1969, p. 713, emphasis in original). This makes both love and mourning possible. Destruction is in the service of being able to feel fully alive, because external reality is reassuringly knowable, and puts “the brakes” on the terrifying world of fantasy and merger (Winnicott, 2002, p. 153). Ogden argues that the creation of externality is simultaneously the creation of the unconscious (Ogden, 2016, p. 1255). “Here fantasy begins for the individual” (Winnicott, 1969, p. 713). While object relating “can be described in terms of the subject as an isolate,” object usage involves the object “being part of shared reality, not a bundle of projections. It is this, I think, that makes for the world of difference that exists between relating and usage” (Winnicott, 1969, p. 711).

Neither ruthlessness nor ruth is immutable or even solidly enduring over time.

There are two strands to be followed in exploring further the significance of ruthlessness in psychic life. One concerns the many permutations of ruthlessness in the individual for whom ruth, in balance with ruthlessness, is firmly established, and for whom guilt, mourning and compassion are all a possibility. The other is concerned with individuals in whom a capacity for negotiating externality and gathering together of bits and pieces in the face of destruction can never be taken for granted. Here, ruthlessness is predicated on survival of a self and object fusion, in the absence of a steady backdrop of externality. The role of aggression in both needs to be held in mind.

As illustration, those for whom ruth is a constant companion may be unseated by ruth itself. When there is overwhelming worry about or subjection to the fate of another, dissociation or self-protective withdrawal might come into play for a time. At the other extreme, those for whom pre-ruth is a way of remaining relatively free, consciously at least, of earliest agonies, acts of generosity and thoughtfulness sometimes occur, however sequestered or ringed around with defence or brittleness. I will be arguing that an awareness of movement in and out of states of ruthlessness and ruth, their relationship to achievement of object usage, and the meaning of each for an understanding of a patient’s needs of the therapy is helpful for both diagnosis and treatment.

Muddles

The road from ruthlessness to ruth is not straightforward. It is possible to reconstruct through Winnicott’s prolific descriptions of mother/baby units the multiple ways in which the process might be compromised (Winnicott, 1971, 1990). There is an important caveat, however: all mother/baby units experience some bumps and bruises. It is the pattern that matters, not bad hours or days taken singly. Winnicott begins from a place of assuming resilience, even as he imagines us into a world in which psychic survival cannot be taken for granted. In the idea of the “good enough” is of course the idea that ordinary failures are seldom catastrophic, so long as the steady pattern is one of satisfactory provision. What is good enough will vary from unit to unit, depending on a range of challenges to be faced. Against the stark backdrop of destructiveness and the onslaught of early emotional life, the assumption of resilience is vested in two places: the mother’s “primary maternal preoccupation,” a kind of illness that allows fierce protectiveness of the doubly dependent new person being hatched, and in the infant’s own will to live (Winnicott, 2002, pp. 302–303).

There are several ways in which ruthlessness is rendered futile, and in that sense emptied of meaning. In cases of neglect, the baby’s ruthless demand is unfelt, unheard or ignored, and crying itself may stop, as the baby drifts into psychic deadness or traumatic dissociation. But then there is the opposite. Continuous crying, with no periods of quiet satisfaction or pleasure, may cause the mother to feel that responding is futile. Over-exact anticipation of the baby’s every need also renders ruthlessness futile, as there is no space for the need to be experienced at all. Ruthlessness may also become distorted when the baby’s need is persistently misinterpreted: hunger as cold, cold as tiredness, and so on. Fobbing off the baby by responding to a need imagined by the mother but not attuned to the baby’s state carries the danger of folding the baby into compliance or despair. It brings the danger of muddling profoundly links between psyche and soma as the baby begins to associate hunger with temperature, or food with feeling cold or wet.

Too deep a resonance with the baby’s affective state also carries dangers. By receiving the baby’s terror with terror of her own, the mirroring mother amplifies her ruthless baby’s ocean of affect. The mother is alive, and revisiting her own baby terror; despite aliveness, survival is constantly in doubt. As Fonagy and his colleagues point out in the literature on attachment and mentalization, contingent affective responsiveness regulates through resonating with the general colouring of the baby’s affect, without reproducing it in exact form (Allen et al., 2008; Fonagy, 2006, p. 68; Fonagy and Campbell, 2015, p. 236).

Further, if the mother is experienced as empty internally, or psychically dead, the baby gives up on lusty demands, because the response to them is drained of affect and devoid of spontaneity. Some mothers retaliate, matching the baby’s ruthlessness with anything from a punishingly strict timetable to rough handling and anger. If this is the cas...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Ruthless Winnicott and the Decolonial Project
• 1 We Want to be Eaten
• 2 Ruthlessness and Idealization
• 3 Having a Good Peep: False Selves and Use of the Therapeutic Space
• 4 The Weeping Couch
• 5 Masks, Slipping
• 6 Rhodes, Falling
• 7 Ruth and the Missing Middle
• 8 Decolonizing Psychoanalysis
• Index