Donald Winnicott and Educational Transitions
A reminder:
Lived 1896 – 1971 in England. Eventually
became President of the British
Psychoanalytic Association.
Variously described as a pediatrician,
psychiatrist, sociologist, and psychoanalyst,
who at one time gave various BBC talks.
Apart from a distinct way of describing child
development, he introduced the following
key terms: holding environment, transitional
object, and the true- and false-self.
There is an imaginative simplification
at the heart of Winnicott’s theorising,
but its context is largely Freudian,
but with a modified theory of the
social mask or ‘persona’ identified by
Jung. And, as before, some
knowledge of the distinctions
between Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s
approaches to knowledge acquisition
is helpful.
For Freud, the limit case between the mind and
biological (physiological) instincts is set by the
mediating notion of the ‘drive’. Freud indicates
that human mental life is structured around the
consequences of a fundamental contradiction in
our biological make-up. On the one side there
are ‘individual’ instincts that are said to be
selfish and self-preserving, while on the other,
there are others which have developed to aid
human survival within groups. Maturation of
the body involves maturation of the instincts,
and this is experienced in terms of the
strengthening, disappearance, or modification of
the ‘drives’ as one ages.
Piaget emphasises the individual’s exploratory
capacity in relation to his immediate
environment. For Piaget, the individual’s
capacity to react to an environment changes
through this process of exploration so that the
individual, the individual’s relationship to its
environment, and the nature of that environment
itself as experienced, becomes ever more
complex. Again, maturation forces the pace, and
while the readiness to explore one’s environment
may diminish with age, its nature does not
change. Instead of the Freudian ‘drives’, Piaget
argues for the development of mediating
‘schemas’ for interaction devoted to different
forms of social and individual survival.
Vygotsky – the other, principal psychologist
studied within the Early Childhood Pathway,
places much greater emphasis on the importance
of language in social maturation. His main
contribution is to emphasise the significance of
educational discourse in which the child is
brought to re-assemble its existing knowledge –
sometimes by incorporating new material –
through its interaction with a more
knowledgeable ‘other’ – usually an adult.
(Growth is said to take place within a Zone of
Proximal Development.) Like Piaget, Vygotsky
is more properly described as a psychologist,
rather than a psychoanalyst.
And so to Winnicott the psychoanalyst. Putting
the matter of the distinction between
psychoanalysis and psychology very crudely,
while Piaget and Vygotsky speculated at the
margins of what counted as scientific
respectability at the time, both Freud and
Winnicott operated beyond these margins. Both
men claimed that they worked ‘scientifically’, but
the objects of their studies were much less easily
defined than the acquisition of knowledge. While
Piaget and Vygotsky could assemble evidence
that they thought implied the existence of
patterns to learning, Freud and Winnicott faced a
challenge of a much higher order.
Both men theorise about the unconscious largely
by means of analogy, metaphor, and the
adaptation of ideas taken from the arts and
sciences, e.g. drama, mythology, but also
economics, physics, etc. Furthermore, not only
are their sources of evidence diffuse and
indirect, the set of ‘objects’ that interest them
consists of ‘patterns’ within social life – forms of
social relationality, e.g. the emotions, the acts of
will, the maintenance of a sense of identity, etc.
expressed through language and social life, but
which conceal their origins within a mind that
may owe as much to the body for its nature as it
does to ‘abstract’ thought.
For Winnicott, then, the greatest mystery of
early childhood life is how children come to
recognise the meaningfulness of things - how, in
other words, they come to accept that their
entire experience is not only meaningful to them
but - by a process of mediation using abstract
symbols – how they gain the ability to share
these experiences with others.
Clearly this involves language, but Winnicott’s
focus is general – he wants to explain how we
enter the symbolic world, how we maintain
ourselves within it, how we may develop – and,
of course, being a psychoanalyst, how such
developments can go wrong.
(This last point introduces a topic that has
been the focus of cultural critique in its own
right. Each theory of development attempts
to represent a process of ‘normal’
development, and by implication also says
something about what constitutes ‘abnormal’
development. This falls very much within
the scope of Michel Foucault’s historical
studies. My recommendation is rather than
reaching for his famous Discipline and
Punish – typically cited in relation to
education – it will be more helpful to read
his: Madness and Civilisation.)
It is necessary to know something about
Winnicott’s initial research context:The group of psychoanalysts he worked with
during the Forties and Fifties included John
Bowlby – the ‘father’ of what is now known as
‘attachment theory’. During the Second World
War, he was employed as a consultant
psychiatrist for the evacuee programme. This
involved predominantly urban children being
removed from their cities to places of greater
safety from bombing - usually rural and smalltown communities. Inevitably, there were
problems and it is these children who were
Winnicott’s first patients.
There is a further aspect to this same context.
Winnicott’s authority within British psychoanalysis
(based on the Tavistock Institute, in London) resulted in
him being invited by the BBC throughout the Fifties to
contribute to a number of programmes discussing the
desirable conditions for child nurture. But by the
Sixties, some feminist critics had suggested that his
emphasis on the importance of the mother had been
appropriated by the State for propaganda purposes,
rather than for its scientific accuracy. The suggested
rationale for this conspiracy was that by persuading
women to stay at home with their children job
opportunities in the factories would be freed-up for the
men returning home after the war.
A Holding Environment
Winnicott’s concept of the ‘good-enough mother’
assumes that she will exercise what might be
described as an ordinary level of devotion and
loving care. He identifies this as the basic
foundation for any child’s later psychological
health.
A central aspect of this interaction between
mother and child is what Winnicott calls a
‘holding environment’. He describes in unusual
detail the processes by which a baby is picked
up, handled, bathed, cleaned, played with, etc. –
all of which are said to contribute to the baby’s
first idea of the mother.
Winnicott argues that the child’s sense of its
own embodiment – its recognition of its own
body as the place where its experiences are
focussed – cannot develop adequately without
an initial period in which the experience of its
own unrecognised dependency is met by
consistent forms of loving handling. This
allows the infant to continue living within an
illusion of its own omnipotence until such time
as it can begin to interact with the environment
unaided by the mother. This, of course, entails
a sometimes extended period in which the
mother must progressively reduce the level of
her own interventions on the child’s behalf.
Winnicott’s concept of the ‘holding environment’
can be compared with Harré’s account, and both
men use their respective characterisation of very
early childhood as the means to define what
might be called the necessary developmental
pre-conditions for their theories.
Winnicott argues that as the child develops, so
too do its forms of dependency. For normal
development to take place there has to be an
equivalent to the infant’s initial holding
environment, only now this holding is done by
other carers, by siblings, by the family, and
eventually extended social groups, such as
school, university, and work-place.
The Anti-Social Tendency
An implication of Winnicott’s extended concept of
holding is that dependency itself must change with
maturity, so that the form of holding appropriate
to one form of dependency may no longer offer an
adequate form of holding in a new situation.
Anti-social behaviour is, at root, a cry for help - a
search for a new form of holding, and also an
expression of the sense of having lost a
previously successful social integration – a lost
balance between need and response. Rather like
Vygotsky, Winnicott sees the value of creative
play, arguing that it offers the child a means to
constructs for itself a holding environment.
The Sense of Being – the major ‘driver’ of
Winnicottian theory
Without an adequate initial holding environment
the child’s sense of being can be lost. This results
in the development of a ‘false’ sense of being.
The characteristic feature of this will be various
forms of docile compliance relative to whichever
holding environment the child is currently
experiencing. Winnicott’s diagnosis implies that
the development and maintenance of a true sense
of being will always result in a level of conflict
between individuals within the relevant holding
environment. (It may be helpful to compare this
with Rousseau’s notion of amour-de-soi.)
Playing and Reality
Winnicott describes initial play as taking place in the
potential ‘space’ between the ‘baby’ and the ‘mother
figure’ – the quotes are here to remind you that for
Winnicott the structure of critical events in early infancy
give specific form to all subsequent developments that
are equivalent in kind. For instance, a ‘play situation’
refers to the good-enough mother’s readiness to initiate
play with the baby, and for the baby to recognise this
initiation as coming from a trusted mother figure.
Given the baby’s initially weak sense of self, much
depends on the nature of the mother’s responsiveness.
Curiously, little is said of the significance of language,
or more properly, discourse.
For Winnicott, then, the whole momentum of
development is dependent on the mother’s
behaviour and attitude, and how this is expressed
will have a profound impact on all subsequent
development. The good-enough mother will be
consistently responsive to the infant, allowing its
sense of self to develop through an illusion of
omnipotence which she can at least temporarily
sustain. The true sense of self can only flourish
in such an environment, i.e., one which relies on
the mother’s optimal responsiveness to the
infant’s expressions. (And, just to make the point
again, in relation to later forms of play, creativity
itself demands as a pre-requisite the re-creation
of a ‘maternal’ environment.)
Transitional phenomena, creativity, and reality.
When playing within a holding environment,
Winnicott identifies a specific feature which he
terms the ‘transitional object’. This is an object
that is not-me, and yet not not-me either! A
familiar early example would be the favourite
teddy bear or doll, etc. which the child needs to
an almost obsessive degree in times of stress
and almost always when going to sleep.
Winnicott argues that the transitional object is
the means by which the child copes with
separation – and as the child develops, the
identification of an equivalent is a vital ingredient
in subsequent ‘healthy’ development.
Like Vygotsky, Winnicott recognises the positive
and creative aspects of play, rather than just its
capacity to act as a form of self-administered
therapy for stress. In these situations, for
Winnicott it is the child’s interpretative leap into
new holding environments that is at issue. The
transitional object – whether found or self-made
– became the means by which the shock of the
new is mediated in a transitional space so that
the child can reach towards it from an initial
grounding in the familiarities of an already
existing (or identified) holding environment. For
Winnicott, then, play leads to creativity, and
creativity leads to the opening up of new
possibilities and new ways of being.
Given the enormous importance of imitation in
human learning, what Winnicott has to say about
those situations when the transitional object fails
to materialise may seem odd. He argues that just
as in early infancy, where a false sense of being is
a constant developmental danger, in play lacking a
transitional object one ends up with a child (or
adult) making imitative leaps that lack substance silly or embarrassing impersonations, assumed
forms of maturity which cannot be sustained, i.e., a
form of infant compliance. These comments seem
Rousseauesque – think amour-propre - as does
his view that a weak sense of true being exposes
one to the risk of falling prey to the expectations
of others.
Given the significance of the true self, it is helpful
to develop the concept a little further. For
Winnicott, the true self is close to that residuum
that even Locke recognised as marking the
essence of an individual, but Winnicott is following
Freud, and even more closely, Jung in this. He
wants to think of this feature of the self as each
individual’s unique patterning of the drives (or the
archetypes) – those fundamental architectural
features of psychic life that Freud understands as
mediating between the mind and the instincts.
Note Winnicott’s selection of descriptive words –
he talks of integrity, and uses phrases such as
‘connected wholeness’ which are said to
characterise an ‘authentic’ sense of being alive.
Rousseau’s Émile offers few grounds for
compromise until Émile becomes a self-sufficient
adult – Winnicott is more flexible. He extends the
notion of the false-self so that it is used to cope
in a ‘healthy’ way with the social sacrifices that
Freud writes about in his Civilisation and its
Discontents. A healthy false self allows for social
compromise without risking the integrity of the
true self. This implies that in each situation there
is a continuum between the two kinds of self, and
it is the false sense which is a constant source of
danger. The false self presents a mask, or
persona (character) which attempts to anticipate
the demands made by the social situation on the
individual in order to maintain social position.
For infants, matters may be more serious. If the
mother is not good-enough, she is unable to respond
adequately to the individuality of her infant’s needs
and instead looks for the reproduction of her own
gestures, attitudes, etc. Repeated compliance by the
infant becomes the grounds for a false sense of
being starting to dominate proceedings, i.e., the true
sense of self is swamped. If this happens, an entire
set of false social relations can be built up by the
child, and it may end with it living in a world that
lacks any possibility of individual reality (experience
gained through the child’s true self). The child
grows up to be like its mother, or whoever
dominates the initial holding environment at the time
of the self’s mis-direction.
You may find it interesting to use Google to investigate what is known
as Object-Relations theory – particularly the version developed by
Melanie Klein. This was judged by many to be ‘eccentric’, and stood
in opposition to the more orthodox interpretation of childhood
developed by Anna Freud, Freud’s daughter. Klein’s work, however,
speculates in dramatic ways about some of the earliest experiences of
childhood – suggesting a new conception of the origin of personal
being. The library holds a number of books by Winnicott, the most
useful one initially is his Playing and Reality, but there are others.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Winnicott
http://www.reading.ac.uk/pcls/research/winnicott-unit.aspx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s7v7b
http://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Winnicott-D.-The-Theory-of-theParent-Infant-Relationship-IJPA-Vol.-41-pps.-585-595.pdf
http://onluminousgrounds.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/the-creative-space-of-play/
http://www.goodenoughcaring.com/writings/writing84.htm
https://bscw.uniduesseldorf.de/pub/nj_bscw.cgi/d3546718/Winnicott,%20Transitional%20Objects.pdf
http://www.toddlertime.com/mh/terms/transitional-objects-3.htm
http://thinkingthoughtsdotorg.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/d-w-winnicott-ontransitional-object-and-transitional-space/
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/theorists/winnicott.htm
http://mythosandlogos.com/Winnicott.html