Processus de maturation chez l'enfant

by D.W. Winnicott

Dr Winnicott explores the idea that mental health disorders relate to failures of development in infancy. Without denying the importance of inheritance, he has developed the theory that schizophrenic illness shows up as the negative of processes that can be traced in detail as the positive processes of maturation in infancy and early childhood.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Donald Woods Winnicott was an English pediatrician, psychiatrist, sociologist and psychoanalyst.

Reviews

[Michael Lassoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winnicott is one of the few psychoanalytic writers who is nice to read when really in a tizzy. While Freud and many others might be just as pertinent, they rarely have much anesthetic value. Winnicott is very kind. When you read him you get the sense that he likes you and the world is not so bad as you might have thought.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I am only now reading Donald Winnicott for the first time because of my own chronological snobbery. Winnicott certainly got some things wrong — e.g., infant research has, as far as I know, disproven the idea that the infant initially believes herself to be fused with her mother — but most of what he writes is astonishingly spot on. There’s a beauty here and a wisdom that I find breath-taking, especially given that this guy died before I was even born. I picked up this collection of essays to help me become a better clinician, but these writings can help us become better parents and better human beings.

[Sergio Gomes]

The Environment and maturational process is one of the best books Winnictt. In this unique book, he presents and advances in some of his ideas on the theory of emotional development, some clinics and some other ideas about psychiatric disorders.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elsker Winnicott, kanskje mer enn Freud!

[Tessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winnicott is trying to describe something extraordinarily delicate: how a human being slowly acquires an inner world capable of holding aloneness, tension, guilt, pleasure, conflict, and meaning without disintegrating. What fascinates me is how this project overlaps with questions I’ve been circling in Bohm, Krishnamurti, and even Jaynes’ idea of the collapse of the bicameral mind. Somewhere between primitive embeddedness in the world and modern self consciousness, we acquired an internal “other,” a watcher of thought, a conscience, a witness. Winnicott’s “good internal object” feels like the psychological microversion of that civilizational shift. His work seems to sit right at the seam where monotheism, inner authority, and the modern self quietly crystallize.
At the same time, this book is uncomfortable, sometimes almost shocking, to a contemporary reader, because Winnicott is still writing inside the heavy machinery of Freudian drive theory and British object relations. The constant recourse to sexual metaphors, “orgasm,” “primal scene,” and bodily climax can feel excessive, even disturbing, until you realize he is reaching for language to describe regulation, integration, and the human need for release from unbearable psychic tension. Read that way, his ideas illuminate everything from ritualized transgression and self sabotage to why people break stasis through conflict, addiction, sex, or intoxication when life becomes intolerable. Winnicott uses this old fashioned vocabulary to describe how humans survive the burden of being conscious. This is a difficult, sometimes unsettling book, but it is one of the most honest and quietly radical explorations of how a self actually comes into existence.

Winnicott’s insistence that the foundations of the self are built not on harmony but on what he calls primitive love and oral aggression, a ruthlessness of impulse that is both loving and destructive. Maturity, in his account, is not the repression of this material but its gradual integration through ego relatedness, the development of a “good internal object,” and the capacity to be alone in the presence of another. Civilization, play, creativity, and even ethical life appear as secondary achievements constructed on top of this unstable psychic ground. Winnicott underlying insight is difficult to escape: that psychological health is not the absence of primitive forces but the fragile and ongoing work of containing them.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 4 out of 5]

More interesting than the other compilations of his articles: this book focuses on delinquency and antisocial tendencies.

It's inevitable, but even the people that haven't read Marx end up concluding that most of the social and psychological symtpoms occur due to external sociological instancies.

[Samuela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find that to be a great book talking early infancy, development, dependency and limitations, false self concept and alike. Just its written in rather a very clinician way / style making it hard to digest at times

[Prerna]

Read

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably in my office along with other DW Winnicott books.