Donald W. Winnicott and the History of the Present

Understanding the Man and his Work

Angela Joyce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429847394
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In November 2015, The Winnicott Trust held a major conference in London to celebrate the forthcoming publication of the Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. Most of the papers given then now constitute the chapters in this book. It not only reflects the ongoing contemporary relevance of Winnicott's work, clinical and theoretical, but these chapters demonstrate the aliveness of Winnicott's contribution as present day practitioners and academics use his ideas in their own way. The chapters range from accounts of the early developmental processes and relationships (Roussillon, Murray), the psychoanalytic setting (Bolognini, Bonaminio, Fabozzi, Joyce, Hopkins) creativity and the arts (Wright, Robinson), Winnicott in the outside world (Kahr, Karpf), to the challenge to the psychoanalytic paradigm that Winnicott's ideas constitute (Loparic).

Chapter One
Emergence and conception of the subject (self)

René Roussillon

I do not think I am mistaken in thinking that D. W. Winnicott would have liked his writings and elaborations to form a possible basis for the creativity of analysts who refer to them. So I feel completely in tune with him in developing the way in which I draw on some of his intuitions to develop my own work. There are domains of clinical psychoanalysis where I still do not have the feeling that I have been able to rise to the level of his contribution; but there are others where I feel that, benefitting also from the contribution of Freud and of French psychoanalysis, I have been able to extend certain of his propositions in a way that has been useful to me in my clinical practice and in my understanding of certain pathologies of narcissism.

In this chapter I will focus on the manner of understanding D. W. Winnicott’s interest in the self in connection with the place occupied by the “Ich” in Freud’s thought; it is this “Ich” that I translate by “subject”.

Definition of the self, the subject (Ich)

In my reading of Freud and D. W. Winnicott alike, the self, the Ich, or the subject comprises two interconnected dimensions.

On the one hand, the term designates the part of the psyche that is at the origin of the actions, processes, and intentions that set it in movement. It designates, therefore, the promoter of psychic life, its author, what vectorises it.

On the other hand, the term also refers to the portion of psychic life that has been appropriated by the actions, processes, and intentions of this internal author. It refers, therefore, to the portion of psychic life and of its history that the subject (self) has been able to make his own, to make “self” (soi). It is thus differentiated from the id which represents processes “without subject or object”, processes of action expressed “in the infinitive” (Freud); it represents the part of the id that has been transformed in order to be integrated with subjectivity (self).

I think that D. W. Winnicott’s contribution on the question of the subject (self) in psychic life lies essentially in an approach that questions at one and the same time its conditions of emergence and its conditions of development. I will be developing three propositions on these conditions of emergence and development.

The first concerns the conditions of subjective experience of creating/finding in which the subject can have a “sense of being” in the sense implied by the famous words of D. W. Winnicott: “First being, after doing or being done to, but first being” (“Creativity and Its Origins”, 1971, pp. 84–85).

The second is related to a decisive subjective experience in the subject’s apprehension of his freedom of being and of being a “subject”: the experience of the conditions that make it possible for the subject to experience himself as formless.

The third determines the possibility for the subject of creating and of taking possession of the category of “subject” (self): it is known as an experience of “survival” and is at the origin of the organisation of the psychic topography, and in its later forms, of the internal organisation of the “subjective” topography, thus of the subject (self) itself.

The sense of being: creating/finding

Before representing oneself as subject (“doing or being done to”), it is necessary to begin with a sense of being (“first being”). The experience of the “sense of being” is thus the basic experience of the foundations of the subject (self).

D. W. Winnicott indicates, I think, that this experience must be sought first of all in the process of creating/finding which he describes as the foundational process of the care of a “sufficiently good mother”, which calls for a slightly more lengthy commentary on the place of the object in the thought of D. W. Winnicott and of its role as a “mirror” of the subject (self) in the process of subjectivation.

One of the essential efforts of Freud was to try to free psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory from the doubts cast over its epistemological and therapeutic value by the accusation of “suggestion”. These doubts were present from the outset, since psychoanalysis was created by differentiating itself from therapies involving suggestion, and were still there in 1937 in “Constructions in Analysis” (1937d), where doubts remain present in the accusation that psychoanalysis is based on a form of the alternative: “Heads I win, tails you lose”. Indeed, Freud initially committed psychoanalysis to his theorisation of the “isolated” individual, considered solely from the point of view of his intrapsychic functioning, independently of any external influences or suggestion, and dreams appeared to him, even more than play or artistic activities, as the very model on which metapsychology should be based.

Dreams are “narcissistic” and seem to escape external influences. It was only at a relatively late stage of his work and in the wake of his text “On Narcissism: an Introduction” (1914c) that Freud would fully recognise that human psychology is also from the outset a “social psychology” (1921c). He was then sufficiently reassured as to the consistency of the psychoanalytic approach to be able, without too much apprehension, to confront the question of the influence of one subject on another. But the consideration of the fact that the object of the drive is also another subject with its own desires and tendencies, a question that was no doubt never neglected in concrete clinical practice—compare the question of seduction and more generally that of trauma and narcissistic disappointment, would never become a central theme of his theorisation. For this place to be fully recognised in the metapsychology, it would have been necessary for it to be articulated with the question (essential in his metapsychology) of hallucination. But it was only in 1937, and thus at the end of his life that he began to see that hallucination does not exclude perception and even that hallucination and perception can go hand in hand and be combined as in delirium.

Right from the beginning of D. W. Winnicott’s thought—his first article concerns manic defence and the denial of reality, both internal and external—the question of the place of external reality and its links with psychic reality is present. But for him as soon as the problem has been raised, it is made more complex by the recognition of an intermediate state that mingles psychic reality and external reality, thus hallucination and perception. In this sense, D. W. Winnicott’s thinking follows on directly from the final intuition of Freud in the years 1937–38 concerning the formations that are superimposed on perception and hallucination. The absolutely central process (I will come back later to this essential point) expressed by Winnicott in terms of “found/created”, supposes, in fact, that the “created” breast—and how, if it is not in a hallucinatory process?—is simultaneously placed by the mother precisely where the infant creates it. The baby, the infant, can thus find outside, in perception, an object that is sufficiently similar to the one that he is capable of creating by means of hallucination. This is no doubt the first form of the “mirror” role of the first environment and particularly of the mother in the emergence of the possibility for the subject to experience himself, take possession of himself, and conceive of himself as such.

The key question, without which D. W. Winnicott’s work is not conceivable, is that of the conditions required so that the adjustment of what is created by the infant, and of what he finds in the relationship to the mother, is sufficiently good for the baby to have the illusion of having created what he finds. It is also the necessary condition for the infant to be able to integrate—in his primary “omnipotence” Winnicott would say—what he finds. The intermediate formation that mixes the created object and the found object, creating a third psychic category— the category of the transitional—thereby establishes a bridge and a continuity between internal reality and external reality and avoids what appears to D. W. Winnicott to be the central danger of development, namely, dissociation.

The process of the found/created must be able to operate in both senses: the infant must find what he is capable of creating and he must be capable of creating what he finds, which presupposes a suitably appropriate environment, an environment that does not put him in a position where he cannot integrate what he finds. This is the very definition of the trauma of the defeat of creativity: being confronted with a situation that one cannot integrate, a situation “within oneself” that cannot be transformed into a situation “for oneself”. The failure of the process will result in an increase in destructiveness whose intensity then appears as reactive to the traumatic character of the failure. D. W. Winnicott crossed swords in this connection with the concept of primary envy proposed by Melanie Klein. Unlike her, he believed envy and envious attacks are reactive to early traumatic situations and directly linked to the failure of the processes of integration to which they attest and thus to an inadequate maternal environment.

In D. W. Winnicott’s thought the setting up of the process created/found is first made possible by virtue of the perfect adaptation—thanks to a fundamental form of primary maternal empathy (“primary maternal preoccupation”)—of the mother. Then, gradually, a gap between the created and the found becomes tolerable to the extent that the young infant is capable of doing the work necessary to reduce this gap and maintain the creative illusion none the less. He will then be in a position to create what he finds, provided that what he finds is sufficiently adapted. The found/created is maintained, then, throughout the process of development thanks to the mother’s initial adaptation first, and then thanks to the psychic work of the subject when he is capable of it subsequently.

Before embarking on an attempt to think through, step by step, the process underlying creative activity, I would like to make two introductory remarks to this question.

Two complementary remarks: hallucination, the malleable medium

My first remark concerns the question of hallucination in its relation with the sexual and creativity. Earlier I raised the question of the nature of the process whereby the “breast” is created; I will come back later on to the complexity of what this process involves at the level of theorisation, but I would like to point out right away that at the heart of “traditional” psychoanalytic thought this process is only intelligible if related to hallucination. That is why it is so essential to link the question of creativity up with the sexual. Hallucinatory wish-fulfilment, which I think is at work in the process of the “created” described by D. W. Winnicott, is a typical process of the drive and of drive life: the sexual and creativity go hand in hand originally, the sexual is at the basis of creativity, and creativity expresses the action of the sexual when it finds occasion to fulfil itself in the service of the ego-subject (self).

The theoretical problem stems from the fact that initially the hallucinatory process was first described by Freud—in connection with the model of dreams—as being linked to an “object-less” form of narcissism, and auto-eroticism as a process that is set up when the object is absent and in an attempt to make up for its absence. Now the hallucinatory process—this follows from Freud’s late propositions and seems quite widely confirmed by the current progress in the neurosciences— takes place in all cases where there is pressure from instinctual drive tension; it is no doubt “automatic” and linked to the very functioning of the depths of the human psyche, to its impulses.

When, by means of hallucination, the process finds the object that it creates, it produces an illusion of self-satisfaction that is absolutely essential in the construction of narcissism and the process of subjectivation; the subject (self) is the one who creates and who produces the conditions of his satisfaction.

The result produced by the success of the “created/found” process corresponds to what Freud calls an illusion: the baby has the illusion of self-satisfaction, of creation; he has a “sense of being” thanks to this illusion “achieved” with the help of the mother’s action. The mother thus allows the baby to transform the “automatic” hallucinatory process, in the case of an increase in instinctual drive tension, into a subjective illusion that is accompanied by pleasure, thanks to which he can partake of subjective experience. It is not yet a “conception” but a felt experience, a “subjective sensation”; however, it forms the base of the future capacity of the subject (self) to conceive of himself and to think about himself as the creator of his capacity for satisfaction.

When the hallucinated object does not find the object thus created, lived experience is at the origin of auto-eroticism provided that he has had sufficient previous experiences of creative illusion and that these have left sufficient traces to be kept “in memory” and activated in a sufficiently “realistic” manner to produce a form of comforting illusion. But, as Freud constantly pointed out, auto-eroticism remains forever unsatisfying; it is consolation.

The conception of a hallucination caused by the absence of the object is still present in many current psychoanalytic contributions in which psychic work is based on the absence or the representation of the absent object. Such a conception rests on the opposition between perceiving and hallucinating, which itself supposes that the perceptual process is a relatively passive process and not highly organised as all the contributions in the neurosciences repeatedly show. It supposes that reality is “given” and not that it is constructed as a psychic category and gradually enriched by experience. It confuses the moment when the process of symbolisation manifests itself with the moment in which it is created; it confuses the second stage of the process with the whole process.

Hallucination is the perceptual representation of the expected, desired, hoped-for object. It has to be able to lodge itself in a current perception in order to “realise” itself and fulfil itself; it must therefore find a sufficiently similar perception in the present of the subject in order to have its place there. The “sumbulon” is this first “putting together”, this first union of an internal process and an external “locality”. If the encounter is not timely, or not sufficiently timely, it produces a state of primary narcissistic disappointment and a sense of distress, which, if it is prolonged, is at the origin of the death-anxieties and reactive destructiveness which D. W. Winnicott regards as the central axis of the pathological processes. It is only later and once experiences of fulfilment have been sufficiently accumulated that it will make autoeroticism possible.

My second remark concerns the question of the role and place of the object in the setting-up and maintenance of the “found/created” process.

In many of his early texts, D. W. Winnicott focused above all on maternal care, “holding, handling, and object-presenting” principally, and the manner in which these different components of maternal care contributed to the healthy psychic development of the baby and of the young child. It was already possible to sense from what he said about this, that beyond maternal care proper, D. W. Winnicott was already trying to circumscribe the mother’s investment and her ability to tune in with the needs of the infant’s ego and thus with the emergence and construction of his subjectivity. Naturally it is during the early stages of life, through the body and sensoriality, and even sensori-motricity, that primitive communication is established, and it was to D. W. Winnicott’s credit that he was sensitive to this dimension through his different studies of the primary conditions of the relationship. But it was when he put forward the mirror role of the mother’s face that he made a decisive step forward in the theorisation of the general meaning of primitive communication and of its place in the emergence of the capacity of the subject (self) to take possession of himself and of what he produces.

D. W. Winnicott’s hypothesis is that the function of the mother’s face and of what it expresses in relation to the infant is to reflect to him his own internal states or at least messages about them. From reading D. W. Winnicott’s chapter on the function of the mother’s face, it is clear that while the face is undoubtedly a central element of the “mirroring” role that he ascribes to the mother, it is the mother’s whole mode of presence that functions as a mirror for him. Here we have a variant of the “found/created” process: the infant must first see “himself” in the mother’s face and in her bodily mode of presence, and from there he must “sense himself”, but it is a variant that provides one of the keys to the process itself.

The insistence placed classically on projective processes emphasised that the infant found what he created projectively. D. W. Winnicott points out the complementary importance of the “return” processes whereby the infant internalises the reflection that he perceives of himself in the response of the primary objects to his own movements and states. D. W. Winnicott makes a fundamental contribution here to the theory of narcissism and to the theory of how the subject (self) initially takes possession of itself by describing the essential intersubjective vector involved. The infant sees himself as he is seen; he “creates” himself as he is seen, senses himself as he is sensed; reflected by the maternal environment, he identifies with what is reflected of himself.

It is necessary, I think, to make a link here with what Marion Milner has described concerning the “pliable medium”. Moreover, it is no doubt rather difficult to know precisely what one owes to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Emergence and conception of the subject (self)
• CHAPTER TWO In between sameness and otherness: the analyst’s words in interpsychic dialogue
• CHAPTER THREE An investigation into the technical reasons Winnicott proposes that the analyst’s objective hate towards the patient has to eventually be made available for interpretation
• CHAPTER FOUR Meeting Winnicott
• CHAPTER FIVE There’s no such thing as a baby: how relationships support development from birth to two
• CHAPTER SIX The irrepressible song
• CHAPTER SEVEN Creativity in everyday life (or, Living in the world creatively)
• CHAPTER EIGHT Images and words: some contemporary perspectives on the concept of regression
• CHAPTER NINE The public psychoanalyst: Donald Winnicott as broadcaster
• CHAPTER TEN Beyond the consulting room: Winnicott the broadcaster
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Winnicott’s paradigm shift in psychoanalytic theory and practice
• INDEX