Donald Winnicott
Some wiki-factoids:Lived 1896 – 1971 in England, and eventually became
President of the British Psychoanalytic Association.
Variously described as a pediatrician, psychiatrist,
sociologist, and psychoanalyst, gave BBC talks.
Apart from a distinct way of describing child
development, he introduced the following key terms:
holding environment, transitional objects, and the
true and false self.
Your two hand-outs are intended to give you an overview of Winnicott’s
version of developmentalism, and so you have here another critical
object that falls into our second category – and into Walkerdine’s sights.
But as with any developmental theory, to really start your critique you
need to grasp the imaginative simplification which typically lies at the
heart of your ‘object’.
For instance, Freud’s theory is driven by the tension between individual
selfish instinct and the survival need to stay within the group, with
instinctive maturation forcing the pace. Piaget’s theory emphasises the
individual’s exploratory capacity in relation to an environment, and the
individual’s capacity to react to that environment with increasing
sophistication so that both the individual, and its relationship to the
environment, becomes ever more complex – again, a form of instinctive
maturity forces the pace, but are his ‘schema’ really instincts.
With Winnicott, you may find it helpful to compare what he says about
transitional objects with Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development.
Both men seem less interested in maturational changes and more
interested in how social contexts are ‘internalised’ – assuming, therefore,
that their explanations hold true for the whole of maturation.
So perhaps the starting point for today is something
like this: while Piaget is interested in environments of
all sorts, and has been accused of not taking the social
dimension very seriously, Vygotsky clearly does take it
very seriously indeed, as does Winnicott.
The most striking difference between Vygotsky and
Winnicott is that Winnicott locates the focus of his
theory in the experiences of much younger children
than does Vygotsky. However, despite their
differences, both use their particular explanations as
ways of also stressing the significance of play and
creativity.
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 can share
experiences with others.
Clearly this involves language, but Winnicott’s focus is much more
general – he wants to explain (like the French psychoanalysts
Jacques Lacan) how we enter the whole of the symbolic world,
how we maintain ourselves there, how we may develop within it –
and of course, being a psychoanalyst, how such developments
can go wrong.
N.B. If you do decide to make psychological developmentalism
your critical object, you might find it helpful to ask yourself a) how a
particular theory suggests development can go wrong, and b) how
this ‘wrong’ development expresses itself.
This last point introduces a new idea that we have not really
discussed, although we touched upon it last week in relation
to Autism. Each of these developmental theory describes a
process of supposedly ‘normal’ development, and by
implication also says something about ‘abnormal’
development. This falls very much within the scope of
Foucault’s writings ( as Wakerdine indicates in her chapter).
Here, perhaps rather than reaching for his Discipline and
Punish, you may find it illuminating (and not too hard) to look
at another of his books: Madness and Civilisation.
There are others by Foucault and more contemporary authors
- Emile and I can advise. Please also recognise that you may
find parallel work that you have done, or are doing, with
Stephanie, Simon, or Wayne relevant here – do please make
use of this in your second assignment if you find it helpful to
bring it into your discussion and analysis.
More information on Winnicott’s technical vocabulary.
Three matters of context:Firstly, the group of psychoanalysts he worked with during the Forties and
Fifties included John Bowlby – take a second look at the YouTube clip
and ask yourself if what Bowlby is saying still seems consistent with the
kinds of descriptions Sarah Blaffer-Hrdy wants to make.
Secondly, during the Second World War, he was employed as a
consultant psychiatrist for the evacuee programme – the planned
evacuation of all children away from the urban centres most likely to be
bombed – typically, these children were taken into rural and small-town
communities that were very different from the communities from which
they had come. Inevitably there were many instances in which the
children were very upset and failed to ‘settle down’ and these were
Winnicott’s first patients.
Thirdly, he became an early and popular ‘guru’ on the BBC during the
Fifties – some criticism has suggested that his emphasis on the
importance of the mother was used by the authorities as propaganda to
get women to stay at home, i.e. to free-up places in the work force.
A Holding Environment
Winnicott’s concept of the ‘good-enough mother’ assumes what might
be described as an ordinary level of devotion and loving care which
Winnicott identifies as the most basic foundation for psychological
health.
An aspect of this is the ‘holding environment’, and Winnicott describes
in unusual detail the processes by which a baby is picked up, handled,
bathed, cleaned, played with, etc. – all of which contributes to the
baby’s first idea of the mother. He argues that the child’s sense of its
own embodiment – its recognition of its own body as the place where its
experience is focussed – cannot develop adequately without the
experience of its own unrecognised dependency being met by
consistent forms of loving handling so as to allow in to continue living
within an illusion of omnipotence until it can begin to interact in initially
limited ways with the environment unaided by the mother (see also slide
10).
More on the ‘holding environment’:
Winnicott also uses the concept as an extended metaphor to explain a
necessary pre-condition for all subsequent development.
He 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.
(Compare this with the Bowlby/Blaffer-Hrdy notion of the environment
of evolutionary adaptedness. You might also find certain novels
illuminating here, for example, J. P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the
Anemone introduces a form of holding by a sibling, the start of
Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit introduces an
extended evangelical social group, while the beginning of Gunter
Grass’ The Tin Drum leads you back to the Second World War and a
truly extraordinary version of ‘holding’.)
The Anti-Social Tendency:
An implication of Winnicott’s extended concept of holding is
that dependency itself changes as the individual matures.
This entails that the form of holding appropriate to a
particular state of dependency must also change, i.e., the
mother, or the family, or the school, may no longer offer an
adequate form of holding.
Anti-social behaviour is therefore, at root, a cry for help, a
search for a new form of holding, and also an expression of
a sense of loss of a previously successful social integration
– a lost balance between need and response. Rather like
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and creative play,
Winnicott sees creative play as a strategy by which the child
constructs for itself a form of holding environment.
The Sense of Being – the major ‘driver’ of the Winnicott’s theory:
Overview:
Without an adequate initial holding environment the child’s sense of
being can be lost and this means, according to Winnicott, that instead
of a true sense of being developing a false one will. The
characteristic aspect of this falsity will be various forms of docile
compliance relative to whichever holding environment the child is
currently experiencing. This 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 and its development.)
Perhaps one of the most interesting further comments Winnicott
makes in relation to the notion of the false self is his suggestion that
as development proceeds so too does play, and play staves off the
threat of developing a false self relative to a particular form of
dependency – recall again Vygotsky’s comments on play – and see
also slide 12.
Playing and Reality:
Winnicott described playing 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 a specific form to all subsequent equivalent developments.
Initially, the 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 – indeed, for Winnicott the whole
momentum of development is dependent on the mother’s behaviour
and attitude. The good-enough mother is 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 an environment that relies on the
mother’s optimal responsiveness to the infant’s expressions. (In
relation to later forms of play, its creativity therefore entails the recreation of a ‘maternal’ environment.)
Transitional phenomena:
In play Winnicott identifies the ‘transitional object’ – an object that is not-me
and yet not not-me either – a familiar 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 argued
that it was the means by which the child coped with separation – and as
the child developed, the identification of its equivalent was a vital ingredient
in healthy development. Only through this structure of experience could
the child (or adult) become strong enough to withstand being denied
access to an appropriate holding environment.
But like Vygotsky, Winnicott recognised 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, it was the child’s interpretative leap
into new holding environments that was at issue, and the transitional object
– whether found or self-made – became the means by which the shock of
the new was mediated in a transitional space so that the child could reach
towards it from the familiarities of its present holding formation. For
Winnicott, then, play led to creativity, and creativity led to the opening up of
new possibilities – new ways of being.
Given the enormous importance of imitation in human learning, what
Winnicott had to say about those situations when the transitional
object failed to materialise may seem odd. He argued 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
with a child (or adult) making imitative leaps that lacks substance silly or embarrassing impersonations, assumed forms of maturity
which cannot be sustained, i.e., a developed form of infant
compliance. These comments seem Rousseauesque – as does his
view that a weak sense of true being exposed 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 making the essence of an
individual – but in fact Winnicott followed Freud in wanting to think of
this as each individual’s unique patterning of instinct. But note
especially Winnicott’s descriptive words – integrity, connected
wholeness – these characterise an ‘authentic’ sense of aliveness.
Rousseau’s Émile offers few grounds for compromise until Émile has
become a self sufficient adult – Winnicott is more flexible. He extends the
notion of the false self so as to use it as a means to healthily cope with the
kinds of social sacrifices Freud wrote about in Civilisation and its
Discontents. A healthy false self allows for social compromise without
falsifying the integrity of the true self, but in each of this there is a continuum
between the two kinds of self, and the false sense can become a 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 – and clearly, one is really
describing the experience of most adolescents in the family home!
For the infant matters may be more serious. If the mother is not goodenough, 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 becoming misunderstood for the true self. If this
happens, an entire set of social relations can be built up by the child until it
ends by living in a world which lacks personal reality – the child grows up to
be just like its mother, brother, or whoever dominated this initial holding
environment at the time.