The Evolution of Winnicott's Thinking

Examining the Growth of Psychoanalytic Thought Over Three Generations

Margaret Boyle Spelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781782200789
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429920691
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What happens to the thinking of a thinker who refuses a discipleship? This book attempts to answer this question in relation to D. W. Winnicott and the evolution of his thinking. He eschewed a following, privileging the independence of his thinking and fostering the same in others. However Winnicott's thinking exerts a growing influence in areas including psychoanalysis, psychology, and human development. This book looks at the nature of Winnicott's thought and its influence. It first examines the development of Winnicott's thinking through his own life time (first generation) and then continues this exploration by viewing the thinking in members of the group with a strong likelihood of influence from him; his analysands (second generation) and their analysands (third generation).

Part I
The Evolution of Winnicott’s Thinking

Overview

Donald Woods Winnicott¹ never tires of telling us that the individual human being is programmed for health and integration so that given a facilitating environment the maturational process unfolds naturally. In the two chapters of Part I, we trace Winnicott’s own maturational process in psychoanalytic thinking throughout his life, towards its enduring independence. The method used is that recommended by Winnicott himself for mapping Freud’s thinking: “Freud’s works, read in chronological order give a good idea of the way his ideas developed” (1996, p. 8).

Due to restrictions of space, an extensive commentary completed for this study arising from the comprehensive chronological reading of Winnicott’s thinking cannot be fully included here. Instead, it is used to provide a portrait of Winnicott as a thinker giving the main features of the evolution of his thinking at the beginning, middle and end thirds of his professional life. This is supplemented by an analysis of the content of Winnicott’s oeuvre, using the comprehensive commentary to yield cluster concepts and themes, which gives a holistic and at-a-glance impression of apparent patterns in the development of Winnicott’s thinking (see Figure 2 and Appendix B).

An attempt has been made to trace and represent all the important facets of Winnicott’s evolving thinking in a balanced way by privileging those papers he deemed his seminal psychoanalytic ones whilst giving the full range of his “voice” by representing papers acknowledging the variety of his audiences. It is hoped to give a sense of Winnicott the person² and his environment whilst detailing the nature of his thinking and its lasting contribution to psychoanalytic thought. This study proposes that Winnicott’s thinking has within it ideas and traits which make it easy for his thinking to be used and to evolve in the thinking of others. The first instance of each of these is flagged in Appendix A by having “facilitative” written after it in brackets.

Given the importance attached to the environment in Winnicott’s thinking, we consider the development of his thinking in tandem with a chronological exploration of the facilitating environment provided through Winnicott’s letter-writing. Winnicott lived throughout his professional life at the hub of the psycho-analytic community. It was Ernest Jones,³ the founder of the British Psycho-Analytic Institute and Society, to whom Winnicott went when he first sought a psychoanalytic treatment.⁴ He trained there and it remained the mainstay of Winnicott’s thinking environment throughout his career. His correspondence,⁵ much of which is written after the weekly Wednesday scientific meetings, represents his lively personal responses within the community’s psychoanalytic discourse.⁶ Studied in tandem with the chronologically ordered exploration of his papers, it enables us to sample Winnicott’s facilitating professional environment and track the evolution of his thinking to distil its enduring characteristics.

Chapter One
Winnicott’s own maturational process and facilitating environment

In this chapter we chart Winnicott’s thinking at the first level mentioned in the introduction. First, we outline the central subject of this study, which is Winnicott’s thinking, giving concepts and then processes, briefly situating it within the thinking of Freud and Klein. We then survey its unfolding trajectory according to Winnicott’s “fact of dependence” in a brief chronology of Winnicott’s professional life which recognises the reliance of its maturational process on a facilitating environment. Here we also validate those characteristics of his thinking already hypothesised elsewhere and listed in Appendix A (Guntrip, 1975; Kahr, 1996; Spelman, 2001). Next, in further preparation for the exploration of Winnicott’s thinking in subsequent generations, we consider the results of an analysis of the content of Winnicott’s thinking. In this analysis are the portrayal of individual concepts and the cluster concepts which suggest themselves as Winnicott’s perennial themes.

The parameters of Winnicott’s thinking

Winnicott was twenty-three and already a medical doctor when he first became interested in psychoanalysis after reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1990). His first analyst, James Strachey and his second, Joan Riviere, were both analysed by Freud and were considered to be, for the most part, Kleinians. He had supervision with Klein when he began treating children and, like her, believed that the analysis of children was the same as that of adults. Winnicott’s particular contribution may therefore be thought of as resting on the theoretical basis of the thinking of both Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. Goldman (1993a, p. 170) says that it is what Freud put in a footnote that Winnicott made his life’s work to explicate.⁷ Winnicott differed from Freud in privileging the importance of experience over instinct and he disagreed with Klein’s idea of innate envy which assumed the innate representation of the object at birth. Winnicott attributed as much importance to the environment as Klein did to unconscious fantasy or Freud did to instinct. He disagreed with both figures on the existence of the death drive.

Winnicott (1962a, p. 177) said that “Freud was easy to criticize because he was always critical of himself”. It is also true that Winnicott’s objective was different from, but based on, Freud’s. He became increasingly interested in enjoyment and health and emphasised the quality indicators of creative living, wellbeing, aliveness, spontaneity, and feeling real, where Freud stressed instincts and the basal indicators of freedom from disease, and it is from this that we get Winnicott’s (1984b, p. 150) saying: “[w]e are poor, indeed, who are only sane”.

Winnicott nevertheless relied particularly on Klein’s thinking for his clinical work. Of Klein, Winnicott (1962a, pp. 176–177) says: “I believe my views began to separate out from hers, and in any case I found that she had not included me in as a Kleinian”. Winnicott wrote two papers in 1962, two years after Klein died, detailing his debt to her and his points of theoretical divergence. These are discussed in Appendix A.

Winnicott’s particular contribution emphasises the pre-oedipal time of the first dyad before the Oedipus complex of classical Freudian analysis. This is the time range which begins before birth and goes through the pre-object and pre-boundary stages, right up to the time of first object choice and through the refinements of the first object relation. Winnicott emphasises what happens between the mother and the baby from the earliest times of late pregnancy and up to the Oedipus complex. His contribution can be seen as a precursor stage added to the stage of classical analysis. As he says that not everyone reaches to the Oedipus complex, his contribution accounts for and promises therapeutic benefit to more cases than does classical psychoanalysis. Winnicott claims that his thinking derives primarily from his clinical experience and observations as a child and baby doctor and as a psychotherapist treating borderline patients. In 1923 he undertook two appointments, working as assistant physician at the Queen’s Hospital, Hackney, in London’s East End and Paddington Green Children’s Hospital (his “psychiatric snack bar”), where he worked for over forty years until 1963. This became the core of his clinical practice. Winnicott was also the first male child psychoanalyst in Britain and was twice president of the BAPS from 1956–9 and 1965–8.

An overview of Winnicott’s thinking

What follows is an overview of Winnicott’s thinking about human development which does not include his important extrapolations to the clinical situation. It is a much reduced “potted Winnicott” which at once puts Winnicott’s thinking at the centre of this study and economises on space. For a more detailed exposition, see Appendix A.

Environment

Winnicott proposed that the individual preordained maturational process naturally unfolds in the facilitating environment. He saw the workings of the facilitating environment in his paediatric work; the complete and sensitive adaptation of a “good enough” or “ordinary devoted” mother to her infant’s need at the beginning of his life. For him, the prototype environment is the mother’s care experienced over time, and much of his genius is in the fact that he accounts separately and equally well for the very different perspectives of the immature infant and his mature mother.

The mother–infant unit

Winnicott said that there is “no such thing as a baby”, referring to the fact that, from the baby’s perspective (and the mother’s in a limited way), there is no differentiation between “me” and “not me” at the beginning of life. This illusion of unity is part of the mother’s function. It comes out of what he calls her “primary maternal pre-occupation”, which involves a healthy split in the mother’s ego so that she is in the illusion of unity with the infant and simultaneously outside it, creating and maintaining it. Addressing the members of the medical, nursing, and childcare professions, Winnicott was at pains to stress the importance in providing support to the mother and not disturbing what she does spontaneously out of love. The sensitive adaptive mother protects the infant from the full impact of his instincts and of reality, giving managed and manageable amounts of both. She maintains what for Winnicott was not the defence but rather the experience of omnipotence, whereby the baby feeds from a breast that is part of itself and, to an extent, the mother gives milk to a part of herself. Over time, the “good enough” adaptation of the environment results in the infant’s confidence that what he needs he will create/find. This is what Winnicott refers to as primary creativity.

The clinically useful but limited analogy between the analytic couple and the “nursing couple”, with the parallel of therapist’s role/”mother function”, has been the basis of much recent psychoanalytic literature. The earlier the loss of environmental provision, the greater is the impact on the maturational process; likewise, breaks in “going-on-being” in early experiences (privation) are to do with difficulties in boundary formation. For Winnicott, this is the cause of narcissistic, schizoid, and dissociative states. Later experience to do with loss of the love object (deprivation) results in conformity, unreality, delinquency—with the “anti-social tendency” there is a resultant de-fusion of the libidinal and destructive impulses and a lack of development of a “guilt sense”—as well as “false self” living.

In his paediatric work, Winnicott saw that there is a natural preordained maturational process which is ready to unfold given the correct circumstances of a “good enough” mother. Winnicott watched the relationship of the baby’s body and mind and called the newborn baby a “bundle of anatomy and physiology”. Unlike Freud, he believed that the development of the ego and the integrating force was not dependent on the satisfaction of instinct but was reliant on aspects of care. The “holding” of the infant meant that the immature ego’s sense of what Winnicott called “going-on-being” was not disturbed to a degree greater than the infant could tolerate and for Winnicott this could happen as much by unassuaged hunger as by a feed which quelled instinctual urge but is given in an unattuned way so that the infant, though fed, was not “held”. The sensitive mother tends to the child’s ego-needs, such as his need for reliability and to initiate rather than react to his environment. She keeps the child free of what Winnicott calls “impingements” so that he does not experience the five primitive anxieties: falling forever, fragmentation, depersonalisation, de-realisation, and being isolated with no means of communication. In this way, his true self flourishes as it is characterised by spontaneity, enjoyment, liveliness, and creativity.

Dependence

The “fact of dependence” is central for Winnicott and he proposes three stages of dependence: the earliest unaware “absolute” or “double” dependence is on the environment of the mother’s care and her complete adaptation to his needs. “Primary maternal pre-occupation” refers to a level of unity and sensitivity between mother and baby which in other circumstances might be considered an unhealthy schizoid or dissociative state in the mother. The mother splits her ego to be an auxiliary ego for her immature infant. She can take part in this “illusion of unity” whilst remaining outside, “holding” it and continuing to be herself.

At the next stage, of “relative dependence”, from as young as four months of age, the space between the mother and the infant begins to go towards that typifying everyday experience, as the infant, with a rudimentary boundary, tolerates the mother’s imperfect adaptation to his needs through non-serious small failures and immediate mending. She begins to await a signal of need from him and allows the infant to feel “managed and manageable” amounts of reality or separateness whilst protecting him from what are experienced as external forces— the full blast of his own instincts and the demands of outside reality. Done sensitively, this disillusionment is the second part of the mother’s task and enhances the sense of self and of feeling real.

Transitional objects and phenomena

At the beginning of this stage the transitional object—the infant’s first “me-extension” or “not-me” object—is the pre-symbol (of the mother) and a visible sign of the infant’s first provisional step in the journey towards separateness. Winnicott calls the transitional space between the mother and the infant “an absence of space”, as it is filled with dreams, playing, symbols, and transitional phenomena. The paradox is that the question “Did you create it or find it?” will never be put about the object, because it is an external object, found outside but with its meaning conferred on it from within the mother–infant unit.

After absolute dependence and relative dependence comes Winnicott’s third stage—“towards independence”. This is a lifelong aspirational endeavour which is never fully achieved by the person living in healthy relative dependence. It involves one’s sense of self and of feeling real growing into an ever-widening and enriching environment: from the first environment of the (transitional) space between mother and her infant through the environment of the couple and the family and into society, culture, religious, and artistic pursuits. Winnicott considers that the development of ego is first reliant on aspects of baby-care.

With the perfect and complete quality of the environment’s early adaptation and the resultant experience of omnipotence, the infant develops important and vital “primary creativity”. This is a taken-for-granted confidence in the infant that the environment will provide what he needs. Winnicott suggests that in the newborn’s experience, when he wants to feed he finds a breast there just at that moment and it is, paradoxically, both found and created. By this sensitive adaptation of the environment the infant’s confidence builds, making tolerable the initial feelings of separateness and facilitating the growth of the child’s “true self” by him living in his body and feeling real.

This confidence, that is born out of reliable care, generates Winnicott’s important concepts of “potential space” and “transitional space” between the mother and infant. The term “potential space” refers to the aspect of the space that offers infinite variability, depending on experience, and, therefore, of possibility. This is the space of every possible “me”, of freedom, alternatives, and choice, whereas the term “transitional space” emphasises the paradoxical nature of the space, providing a separateness which is a form of unity.

The “between space of experience”

Winnicott says that throughout life the individual is involved in the perpetual task of keeping inside and outside separate yet interrelated. The overlapping space between inner and outer reality—a “third” or intermediate space—is the place of experience. The comparison between this first “between space” with the analytic space has proved clinically useful and has been richly explored in psychoanalytic literature.

Maturation, the mother’s role, and anxiety

As well as the two stages of first creating the illusion of unity and of following this with sensitive disillusionment, the mother’s care involves three tasks: “holding”, “handling”, and “object-presenting”. These protect the baby from the five primitive anxieties or unthinkable agonies mentioned above. Because of the baby’s “being”, his demand-free relaxed identifica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE EVOLUTION OF WINNICOTT’S THINKING
• PART II: WINNICOTT’S ANALYTIC “CHILDREN”
• PART III: WINNICOTT’S ANALYTIC “GRANDCHILDREN”
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A Chronology of Winnicott’s thinking with characteristics and facilitative features
• APPENDIX B Content analysis
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX