Term Paper on "Donald W. Winnicott"

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Winnicott

Critical Evaluation of Donald W. Winnicott's Psychoanalytic Approach and Theories

The Infant, the Mother, and 'Transitional Objects' in Early Childhood Development

In his distinctive and controversial approach to patient treatment, the 20th century British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott (1896-1971) focused on the fundamental importance of the establishment of healthy initial 'object relationships' in infancy: first between mother and infant, and second between the infant and a 'transitional object' (e.g., a blanket, stuffed toy, doll, or something similar) of the child's own choosing. At that second early stage, the 'transitional object' serves as an emotional substitute for the mother herself, a sort of 'portable mother' to the child, at least in an emotional sense, and far more easily handled, moved, mutilated, or otherwise manually manipulated by the child. The transitional object, then, gives the developing infant similar, sometimes greater, emotional security than its first object, the mother or other primary caregiver (Winnicott Playing and Reality 1950, pp. 1-4).

Healthy psychological development of the human infant, then, has mainly to do with the infant's initial relationship to its mother. This object-relationship to its mother is, in the earliest months of the infant's life initially distinct from, from, but later integrally connected with, its healthy relationship to the later transitional object that substitutes, in a sense, for the mother (pp. 2-7). A child's typical transitional object of the sort Winnicott describes might be, for example, a blanket, a teddy bear, or something else chosen from available toys or other household items (p.4).

As Winnicott further states: "The pattern of transitional phenomena [between the infant's initial focus solely on the mother to its initial focus on the transitional objects] begins to show at about four to six to eight to twelve months" (Winnicott, Playing and Reality 1950, p.4). In other words, the time of transition from mother-only focus to external object focus varies greatly from child to child. However, a child's choice of a transitional object and that object's extreme importance to the child, are readily apparent. "The parent gets to know its value and carry it round when traveling. The mother lets it get dirty and even smelly, knowing that by washing it she introduces a break in continuity in the infant's experience, a break that may destroy the meaning and value of the object to the infant" (p.4).

Prior to the infant's transitional object stage, however, the mother must first have created, very early on, the illusion (Playing and Reality pp. 10-13) that her own breast or breast-substitute is a part of the infant's self, fostering the infant's (necessary) earliest, feelings of comfort, mixed with equally necessary early feelings of omnipotence, a stage of development key to the infant's ability to next move in a healthy way to transitional object attachment (pp. 11-15). The infant, according to Winnicott, develops (or does not develop) its internal sense of psychological well-being, based on its earliest relationships to external objects, first to the mother's the breast or breast-substitute (i.e., the nursing bottle). That first object, by providing the infant with food and comfort on demand, offers it an early sense of fusion and omnipotence. That early sense is, according to Winnicot, key to the infant's later ability to make healthy distinctions between itself and others (pp. 5-6).

Later in childhood, continued healthy psychological development of the child requires further separation from the transitional objects of earliest life, e.g., the blanket, the teddy bear, the pillow, or other much-cherished item. However, if early external attachment to the mother's breast (in the infant's own perceptions, the breast actually feels like an internal object: the mother's breast is experienced by the infant as a part of himself or herself, not as a separate object. Therefore, in the earliest months of life, according to Winnicott, the sensation that the mother's nurturing breast gives to the child is actually one of nurturing or comforting itself, not of being nurtured or comforted by someone or something else) is in some manner absent, interrupted, damaged, or compromised, the child will experience developmental difficulties in terms of healthy attachment to future entities that also represent "otherness" from the child: pets, siblings and other family members, schoolmates, teachers, strangers (Playing and Reality pp. 26-37).

As Winnicott further explains, in a developmentally healthy child, the fierce attachment to the transitional object of choice is eventually forgotten, as its importance is lessened through disuse exposure to other intermediate objects:

Its [the 'transitional object's] fate is to be gradually allowed to be decathected detached from], so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. By this I mean that in health the transitional object does not 'go inside' nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between 'inner psychic reality' and 'the external world as perceived by two persons in common' that is to say, over the whole cultural field"(p.5)

If the earliest attachment to the child's first external object, the mother, then, is a healthy one, the child's next attachment stage, to whatever sorts of early 'transitional objects' come next, will be of the sort that will allow the child, in good time, to healthily decathect from those early object attachments, in the same way, and through essentially the same psychological processes, that the earliest attachment to the mother is decathected.

The 'Good-enough Mother'

Winnicott's well-known phrase 'good-enough mother' means that, within a healthy mother-baby dyad, the core, interrelated, early developmental phenomena of mother-object relations and transitional object relations shall occur as a matter of course over a time period to be uniquely determined by this particular mother and child, without the mother's needing to "do" anything in particular, to act in ways other than she would act ordinarily, or to manipulate either her own attitudes and actions or the infant's environment. Her good-enough mother status will most certainly be the case, so long as she is ready, willing, and available to love and nurture her baby in the manner that comes naturally to her. The child of a good-enough mother, then, is bound to develop healthily: first in relationship to her; second in its relationships to transitional objects, and finally in its relationships to the outer world.

In Winnicott's view, new mothers of infants possess all of the instinctive knowledge necessary to be good-enough mothers, that is, they have a natural understanding of how best to care for their own babies, which cannot be taught and should not be tampered with, criticized, demeaned, or second-guessed - by childcare experts or any others. In fact, introducing doubt to a new mother about her good-enough mothering instincts can invite feelings of anxiety, and even, in a worst-case scenario, create enough of these within her, about her innate mothering abilities, to interfere with her own natural and instinctive ability to be a 'good-enough mother' to bring about the healthy development of her child. Within the whole of psychoanalysis, it would be difficult to identify theories besides Winnicott's less interventionist, and more fundamentally accepting, of the mother as good-enough, that is, perfectly adequate exactly as she is. For instance, as Winnicott tells new mothers in Winnicott on the Child (2002):

What you do and know, simply by virtue of the fact that you are the mother of an infant, is as far apart from what you know by learning as is the east from the west coast of England...Just as the professor who found out about the vitamins that prevent rickets really has something to teach you, so you really have something to teach him about the other kind of knowledge, which comes to you naturally"(p.19).

In that respect, Winnicott's same core philosophies: following a patient's lead; recognizing and respecting the instinctive knowledge of mothers, and encouraging new mothers to trust themselves (Winnicott on the Child 2002, pp. 19-20) all increase likelihood of a successful course of psychoanalytic treatment.

Casement (1991) notes, however, that while few psychoanalysts challenge this particular aspect of Winnicott's theory, in practice it is not always easy to achieve. In Learning from the Patient, he states:

Following the patient's lead has always been an important principle of psychoanalysis and analytic psychotherapy. but, in practice, there has been a tendency for some analysts to become inappropriately controlling through being dogmatic, which interferes with the analytic process. Learning to learn from the patient provides balance against this, helping to preserve the analytic space more clearly for the processes within it"(p.ix).

In his own practice Winnicott specialized in treating psychologically disturbed children, as well as their parents, and sought to give the parents, in the course of treatment, insight into their children's past developmental problems and how those were affecting the children now. Winnicott's patients included children who, for whatever reasons, had apparently experienced poor or inadequate early object relations to the mother (or other primary caregiver),… READ MORE

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