Family and Individual Development

D. W. Winnicott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000445954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Family and Individual Development represents a decade of writing from a thinker who was at the peak of his powers as perhaps the leading post-war figure in developmental psychiatry. In these pages, Winnicott chronicles the complex inner lives of human beings, from the first encounter between mother and newborn, through the 'doldrums' of adolescence, to maturity. As Winnicott explains in his final chapter, the health of a properly functioning democratic society 'derives from the working of the ordinary good home.'

Part 1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003209157-1

1 The First Year of Life

Modern Views on the Emotional Development

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003209157-2

INTRODUCTION

A great deal happens in the first year of the life of the human infant: emotional development starts at the beginning; in a study of the evolution of the personality and character it is not possible to ignore the events of the first days and hours (even the last part of the prenatal life when the infant is post-mature); and even birth experience may be significant.

The world has kept turning in spite of our ignorance in these matters simply because there is something about the mother of a baby, something which makes her particularly suited to the protection of her infant in this stage of vulnerability, and which makes her able to contribute positively to the baby’s positive needs. The mother is able to fulfil this role if she feels secure; if she feels loved in her relation to the infant’s father and to her family; and also feels accepted in the widening circles around the family which constitute society.

If we like, we may continue to leave the task of infant care to the mother, whose capacity does not rest on knowledge but comes from a feeling attitude which she acquires as the pregnancy advances, and which she gradually loses as the infant grows up out of her. However, there are reasons why we may profit from a study of what goes on in the early stages of the development of the infant personality. For instance, as doctors and nurses we may need to interfere with the infant-mother relationship in order to deal with the infant’s physical abnormalities, and we ought to know what we are interfering with. Moreover, the physical study of infancy has given rich rewards in the past fifty years, and it might well be that a similar interest in emotional development would produce rewards even more rich. A third reason would be that a proportion of mothers and fathers cannot provide good-enough conditions at the time of the infant’s birth, on account of social, family, or personal illness, and then doctors and nurses are expected to be able to understand and to treat, even to prevent; just as they often have power to do in cases of physical disease. The paediatrician will increasingly need to be as well orientated on the emotional as he is at the present time on the physical side of the map of infant growth.

There is yet a fourth reason for the study of early emotional growth: it is often possible to detect and to diagnose emotional disorder in infancy, even during the first year of life. Clearly, the right time for the treatment of such disorder is the time of its inception, or as near to it as possible. But I will not pursue this theme at this point.

Nor will I make reference to physical abnormality or physical ill health; or to mental growth in terms of developmental tendency, affected by hereditary factors. For present purposes the infant may be assumed to be sound in body and potentially sound in mind; and what I want to discuss is the meaning of this potentiality. What is potential at birth, and, of this, what has become actual at one year? I assume, too, the existence of a mother, a mother who is healthy enough to behave naturally as a mother. Owing to the extreme emotional dependence of the infant, the development or life of an infant cannot be discussed apart from infant care.

I have set down below a series of statements, each briefly expanded. These condensed observations will perhaps indicate to those concerned with the care of the infant the fact that the emotional development of the first year of life comprises the foundation of the mental health of the human individual.

INNATE TENDENCY TOWARDS DEVELOPMENT

In psychological matters there is a tendency towards development which is innate, and which corresponds to the growth of the body and the gradual development of functions. Just as a baby usually sits at about five or six months, and walks somewhere near the first birthday, and perhaps uses two or three words at that time, so there is a process of evolution in emotional development. However, we do not witness this natural growth unless conditions are good enough, and part of our difficulty is the description of the good-enough conditions. In what follows it will be necessary to take for granted the ontogenetic process, and the neurophysiological basis of behaviour.

DEPENDENCE

The great change that is noticed in the first year of life is in the direction of independence. Independence is something that is achieved out of dependence, but it is necessary to add that dependence is achieved out of what might be called double dependence. At the very beginning there is an absolute dependence on the physical and emotional environment. In the earliest stage there is no vestige of an awareness of this dependence, and for this reason the dependence is absolute. Gradually dependence becomes to some extent known to the infant who, in consequence, acquires the capacity for letting the environment know when attention is needed. Clinically there is found a very gradual progress towards independence, with dependence and even double dependence always reappearing. The mother is able to adapt herself to the varying – and growing – needs of her infant in this as in other respects. By one year old, the infant has become able to keep alive the idea of the mother and also of the child care to which he or she is accustomed, to keep alive this idea for a certain length of time, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour, perhaps longer.

What is found at one year, however, is extremely variable, variable not only from one infant to another but also in any one infant. The achievement of a degree of independence may quite normally be lost and regained over and overagain, and often an infant may return to dependence after being markedly independent at one year.

This journey from double dependence to dependence and from dependence to independence is something that is not only an expression of the innate tendency of the infant to grow; this growth cannot take place unless a very sensitive adaptation is made by someone to the infant’s needs. It happens that the infant’s mother is better than anyone else at performing this most delicate and constant task; she is more suitable than anyone else because she is the one who is most likely to be quite naturally and without resentment devoted to this cause.

INTEGRATION

From the beginning it is possible for the observer to see that an infant is already a human being, a unit. By the age of one year most infants have in fact achieved the status of an individual. In other words, the personality has become integrated. This is not of course true all the time, but at certain moments and over certain periods and in certain relationships the infant of one year is a whole person. But integration is not something that can be taken for granted; it is something that must develop gradually in every individual infant. It is not a matter simply of neurophysiology, since for this process to take place there must be certain environmental conditions, actually, those which are best provided by the infant’s own mother.

Integration appears gradually out of a primary unintegrated state. At the beginning the infant is made up of a number of motility phases and sensory perceptions. It is almost certain that rest for the infant means a return to an unintegrated state. A return to unintegration is not necessarily frightening to the infant because of a sense of security that is given by the mother. Sometimes security means simply being held well. Both physically and in more subtle ways the mother or the environment holds the infant together, and unintegration can take place along with reintegration without the development of anxiety.

Integration appears to be linked with the more definite emotional or affective experiences, such as rage, or the excitement of a feeding situation. Gradually, as integration becomes a settled fact and the infant becomes more and more knit together into a unit, so does the undoing of what has been gained become disintegration rather than unintegration. Disintegration is painful.

The degree to which integration has taken place at one year is variable: some infants at this age are already in possession of a strong personality, a self with the personal characteristics exaggerated; others, at the other extreme, have not by the first birthday acquired so definite a personality, and are very much dependent on continuous care.

PERSONALIZATION

The infant at one year is firmly living in the body. The psyche and the soma have come to terms with each other. The neurologist would say that body-tone is satisfactory, and would describe the infant’s coordination as good. This state of affairs, in which the psyche and the soma are intimately related to each other, develops out of the initial stages in which the immature psyche (although based on body functioning) is not closely bound to the body and to the life of the body. When a reasonable degree of adaptation to the needs of the infant is provided, this gives the best possible chance for an early establishment of a firm relationship between the psyche and the soma. Where there is a failure of adaptation, so there is a tendency for the psyche to develop an existence that is only loosely related to bodily experience, the result being that physical frustrations are not always felt with full intensity.

Even in health, the infant of one year is firmly rooted to the body only at certain times. The psyche of a normal infant may lose touch with the body, and there may be phases in which it is not easy for the infant to come suddenly back into the body, for instance, when waking from deep sleep. Mothers know this, and they gradually wake an infant before lifting him or her, so as not to cause the tremendous screaming of panic which can be brought about by a change of position of the body at a time when the psyche is absent from it. Associated clinically with this absence of the psyche there may be phases of pallor, times when the infant is sweating and perhaps very cold, and there may be vomiting. At this stage the mother can think her infant is dying, but by the time the doctor has arrived there has been so complete a return to normal health that the doctor is unable to understand why the mother was alarmed. Naturally, the general practitioner knows more about this syndrome than the consultant.

MIND AND PSYCHE-SOMA

By the age of one year the infant has quite clearly developed the beginnings of a mind. Mind means something quite distinct from psyche. The psyche is related to the soma and to body functioning, but the mind depends on the existence and functioning of those parts of the brain that are developed at a later stage (in phylogenesis) than the parts that are concerned with the primitive psyche. (It is the mind which gradually makes it possible for the infant to wait for the feed because of the noises that indicate that a feed will be forthcoming. This is a crude example of the use of the mind.)

It could be said that at the beginning the mother must adapt almost exactly to the infant’s needs in order that the infant personality shall develop without distortion. She is able to fail in her adaptation, however, and to fail increasingly, and this is because the infant’s mind and the infant’s intellectual processes are able to account for and so to allow for failures of adaptation. In this way the mind is allied to the mother and takes over part of her function. In the care of an infant the mother is dependent on the infant’s intellectual processes, and it is these that enable her gradually to re-acquire a life of her own.

There are, of course, other ways in which the mind develops. It is a function of mind to catalogue events, and to store up memories and classify them. Because of the mind the infant is able to make use of time as a measurement and also to measure space. The mind also relates cause and effect.

It would be instructive to compare conditioning in relation to the mind and to the psyche, and such a study might throw light on the differences between these two phenomena which are so regularly confused the one with the other.

Obviously there is a very great variation from one infant to another in the capacity of the mind to help the mother in her management. Most mothers are able to adapt to each infant’s good or poor mental capacity, to go as fast or as slow as the infant. It is only too easy, however, for a quick mother to get out of step with one of her children who happens to be limited in intellectual capacity; and the quick child is also liable to be out of touch with a slow mother.

At a certain age the child becomes able to allow for the mother’s characteristics, and so to be relatively independent of her incapacity to adapt to her infant’s needs, but perhaps not before the first birthday.

FANTASY AND IMAGINATION

Characteristic of the human infant is fantasy, which may be thought of as the imaginative elaboration of physical function. Fantasy rapidly becomes infinitely complex, but at the start it is presumably restricted in quantity. By direct observation it is not possible to assess the fantasy of a small infant, but play of any kind indicates the existence of fantasy.

It is convenient to trace the development of fantasy by making an artificial classification:

• (i) Simple elaboration of function.
• (ii) Separation out into: anticipation, experience, and memory.
• (iii) Experience in terms of the memory of experience.
• (iv) Localization of fantasy within or without the self, with interchange and constant enrichment of each from the other.
• (v) Construction of a personal or inner world, with sense of responsibility for what exists and what goes on there.
• (vi) Separation out of consciousness from that which is unconscious. The unconscious includes aspects of the psyche which are so primitive that they never become conscious, and also aspects of the psyche or of the mental functioning which become inaccessible in defence against anxiety (called the repressed unconscious).

There is a considerable degree of evolution of fantasy within the first year. It is important to remember that although this (as all other growth) takes place as a part of the natural tendency towards growth, evolution is stunted or distorted except under certain conditions. The nature of these conditions can be studied, and even stated.

PERSONAL (INNER) REALITY

The inner world of the individual has become a definite organization by the end of the first year. Positive elements are derived from the patterns of personal experience, especially of instinctual experience, interpreted in a personal way, and ultimately based on the individual’s inborn inherited characteristics (in so far as they have appeared at this early date). This sample of the world that is personal to the infant is becoming organized according to complex mechanisms which have as their purpose:

• (i) the preservation of what is felt to be ‘good’ – that is to say, acceptable and strengthening to the self (ego);
• (ii) the isolation of what is felt to be ‘bad' – that is to say, unacceptable, persecutory, or injected from external reality without acceptance (trauma);
• (iii) the preservation of an area in the personal psychic reality in which objects have living interrelationships, exciting, and even aggressive, as well as affectionate.

By the end of the first year there are even the beginnings of secondary defences which deal with the breakdown of the primary organization; for instance, a general damping down of all inner life, with clinical manifestation in the depressed mood; or a massive projection into external reality of inner world elements, with clinical manifestation in an attitude towards the world that is tinged with patanoia. A very common clinical manifestation of the latter would be food fads – for example, suspicion of skin on milk.

The infant’s view of the world external to the self is largely based on the pattern of the personal inner reality, and it should be noted that the actual behaviour of the environment towards an infant is to some extent affected by the infant’s positive and negative expectations.

INSTINCTUAL LIFE

At first the instinctual life of the infant is based on the alimentary functioning. Hand and mouth interests predominate, but gradually excretory functions make their contribution. At a certain age, perhaps five months, the infant begins to be able to connect excreting with feeding, and faeces and mine with oral intake. Along with this comes the beginning of the acquisition of a personal inner world, which therefore tends to be localized in the belly. From this simple pattern there is a spreading out of psyche-soma experience to include the whole of the body functioning.

Breathing gets caught up in whatever predominates at the time, so that it may be associated now with intake and now with output. An important characteristic of breathing is that, except during crying, it lays bare a continuity of inner and outer, that is to say, a failure of defences.

All functions tend to have an orgastic quality in that they each in their own way contain a phase of local excitement and preparation, a climax with general bodily involvement, and a period of aftermath.

The anal function acquires more and more importance, so that it may predominate over oral function. The orgasm of ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Preface Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• Dedication Page
• PART 1
• PART 2
• INDEX