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In Search of the Real: The Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott
This book explores the way in which a search for an experiencing that feels real is evident in both Winnicott's life and work. He believed deeply that individuals possess a unique, innate authenticity. One feels most alive and free when in touch with this core sense of real self.
Winnicott's work with patients focused on the experience of what is real in living. He observed that many of his more disturbed patients suffered from a sense of futility. He aimed to facilitate the creation of an internal space in which the patient could learn to play so that life would begin to feel real. For him, this modest yet substantial goal raised questions about the singular role of interpretations as a curative factor. His psychotherapy was not about making clever or apt interpretations. It was essentially a complex derivative of mother's face, affording the opportunity to experience oneself as alive, real, able to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.
Winnicott's theory mirrors the pattern of his own subjectivity and speaks to his own condition. This is not to say that the truth of Winnicott's ideas cannot be evaluated on its own merits. The argument here is that the objective face of theory is not its only face. The method employed is to demonstrate what that theory has to do with Winnicott.
Chapter 1 demonstrates how the originality of Winnicott's thought and his originality as a person are inseparable. Winnicott's narcissism, his desire to playfully transform classical concepts, the pride he took in his inventiveness, his reticence toward closure and dogma and need to maintain ambiguity and fluidity all impacted on the content of his theory.
Chapter 2 traces the association between Winnicott's theory and his biography. Nevertheless, this is not a search for motivations behind his ideas. Its purpose is to demonstrate the centrality of themes that are present in both his upbringing and his work.
Chapter 3 demonstrates how Winnicott sustained a counterpoint between pediatrics and psychoanalysis.
Chapter 4 focuses on Winnicott's dialogue with his non-psychoanalytic intellectual precursors. He was influenced by those whose writings resonated with his own aesthetic sensibilities.
Chapter 5 shows how Winnicott's radical developmental theory was constructed. It demonstrates what aspects of Freudian thought Winnicott internalized and how he made Freud's theory real for himself. Freud was the theoretical luminary around whom Winnicott orbited and the founding father against whom he struggled to authentically differentiate himself.
The epilogue deals with both Winnicott's final paper and the last year of his life. Once again, his subjectivity and theoretical ideas converged. The "Use of an Object" paper was Winnicott's attempt to make public his obscure sense of what enabled him to survive as both a scientist and a dreamer.
Winnicott's work with patients focused on the experience of what is real in living. He observed that many of his more disturbed patients suffered from a sense of futility. He aimed to facilitate the creation of an internal space in which the patient could learn to play so that life would begin to feel real. For him, this modest yet substantial goal raised questions about the singular role of interpretations as a curative factor. His psychotherapy was not about making clever or apt interpretations. It was essentially a complex derivative of mother's face, affording the opportunity to experience oneself as alive, real, able to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.
Winnicott's theory mirrors the pattern of his own subjectivity and speaks to his own condition. This is not to say that the truth of Winnicott's ideas cannot be evaluated on its own merits. The argument here is that the objective face of theory is not its only face. The method employed is to demonstrate what that theory has to do with Winnicott.
Chapter 1 demonstrates how the originality of Winnicott's thought and his originality as a person are inseparable. Winnicott's narcissism, his desire to playfully transform classical concepts, the pride he took in his inventiveness, his reticence toward closure and dogma and need to maintain ambiguity and fluidity all impacted on the content of his theory.
Chapter 2 traces the association between Winnicott's theory and his biography. Nevertheless, this is not a search for motivations behind his ideas. Its purpose is to demonstrate the centrality of themes that are present in both his upbringing and his work.
Chapter 3 demonstrates how Winnicott sustained a counterpoint between pediatrics and psychoanalysis.
Chapter 4 focuses on Winnicott's dialogue with his non-psychoanalytic intellectual precursors. He was influenced by those whose writings resonated with his own aesthetic sensibilities.
Chapter 5 shows how Winnicott's radical developmental theory was constructed. It demonstrates what aspects of Freudian thought Winnicott internalized and how he made Freud's theory real for himself. Freud was the theoretical luminary around whom Winnicott orbited and the founding father against whom he struggled to authentically differentiate himself.
The epilogue deals with both Winnicott's final paper and the last year of his life. Once again, his subjectivity and theoretical ideas converged. The "Use of an Object" paper was Winnicott's attempt to make public his obscure sense of what enabled him to survive as both a scientist and a dreamer.
243 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
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August 11, 2009
This psychobiography of Donald W. Winnicott—a big hitter in Object Relations theory and therapy—shows how his ideas sprang from and related to his life. A pediatrician as well as a psychoanalyst, Winnicott, like Melanie Klein, focused on a period of life neglected by Freud: infancy. But unlike Klein, Winnicott focused less on the fantasies of the infant than on the relationship between the baby and the mother—even going so far as to say that “there is no such thing as a baby” (i.e. the baby does not exist without the mother). Fiercely independent but uncombative, Winnicott tried to avoid the feuds within the British Psychoanalytic Society, especially head-on collisions with the dogmatic Kleinians and orthodox Freudians. Even so he came under attack for his original ideas. Winnicott considered himself a Freudian but insisted that each therapist must understand things in his own way, if necessary relearning old truths by trial and error, because acceptance of undigested dogma tends to lead to ritualized and ineffective therapy. And indeed: Winnicott was famous for his amazing intuitive understanding of patients. He was, according to psychoanalyst Harry Guntrip, who underwent training therapy both with Fairbairn and Winnicott, a “brilliant clinician.” He was not a strong theoretician and in fact had some aversion to theory-building; his insights were empirically derived from continuous clinical observations while treating, in his lifetime, some 60,000 patients.
What were Winnicott’s salient ideas?
*The Real. For Winnicott the most important thing for humans was to be real rather than unreal, to be true to self rather than false, to live rather than merely to exist. And what did being real mean?
The notion of the real is about being alive, creative, spontaneous, and playful; cherishing one’s uniqueness; accepting one’s insignificance; tolerating one’s own destructive impulses; living with one’s own insanity; feeling integrated while retaining the capacity for unintegration; being receptive and open and knowing how to make use of the world without needing to react to it; finding and contributing to the inherited cultural tradition; tolerating one’s essential isolation without fleeing to false relationships or retreating into deleterious insulation. A healthy individual, in Winnicott’s mind, was one who felt real and whole without denying the potential to come undone and feel unreal.
*Creativity First. Unlike Freud and Klein, DWW felt that in humans the creativity of aliveness antedated (in development) the basic instincts and in fact constituted the individual’s prototypic core—that the developing infant essentially creates his own world as he goes along, like a tiny god uniquely integrating diverse elements, and that throughout life this underlying creativity is essential to mental health.
It is vitally important, Winnicott believed, that the infant be allowed to enjoy its true creative potential and bask in the naïve belief that the world is personally created.
For Freud, the baby’s central task was to recognize and accept external reality; for Winnicott, it was to find healthy ways of creating reality. For Freud, reality was a frustrating blow from which people never truly recover; for Winnicott, reality afforded relief and satisfaction from the alarming effects of unbridled fantasy.
*True Self/False Self. Winnicott believed that everyone starts with a true, creative self that feels vital and alive, but that each infant develops a false self (akin to Jung’s “persona”) to survive in the inherently alien world. The false self is necessary to protect the person from the hard edges of reality, and causes little problem so long as the person remains in close contact with his/her real self. But as Winnicott discovered after treating many patients suffering from a pervasive sense of unreality, mental health is endangered when a person loses touch with the real self and totally identifies with the false self.
It is the True Self…that is characterized by the feeling of genuine and authentic wholeness.
[Mother:] must…allow the baby to experience the full force of its own natural zest. The integrity of baby’s separateness must be respected by allowing for its natural instinctive rhythms.
In a sense, Winnicott’s entire developmental theory…is an effort to chart the subtle shifts in the quality of the dialectic between invisible oneness and individuality.
*Holding Environment. It is the mother who creates the “holding environment” that dictates whether the infant will develop the proper balance between the true self and the false self—i.e. whether the baby will develop into a mentally healthy or unhealthy adult. This she does above all by being reliable in caring for the infant.
It is…in the very earliest stages of development that mother facilitates, through her dependability, the capacity to feel real. Certain degrees of failure or chaotic adaptation to the child’s needs will undermine the potential to feel real. Mother is internalized by the infant not only as an object, but as a total environment. The confidence to feel real is evidence of the dependability of that environment. What is more, the mother must allow the infant to bask in the naïve belief that the world is personally created. Winnicott goes beyond the Freudian notion of sublimation and posits a primary creativity or absolute originality that is the psychological root which enables an individual, given good-enough maternal care, to have a sense of the reality of any experience or object.
…[mother:] not only had to facilitate True Self expression but she had to allow for and protect the fundamental isolation of the core of the personality.
*The Good-Enough Mother. No mother can be perfect (from the standpoint of the baby). She cannot always instantly satisfiy the baby’s needs. She cannot be perfectly reliable. But according to Winnicott it is all right to be “good enough”: to be sufficiently reliable to earn the baby’s trust, to allow it to feel confident in the environment and therefore to develop a feeling of safety and comfort that will eventually give it the confidence to separate from mother without excessive fear or pain.
The mother’s active human reliability is an essential foundation of all beliefs. By allowing the baby to go easily to and fro between states of integration and relaxed unintegration, the mother silently facilitates the infant’s belief in its own inner processes.
Winnicott: “It is the instinctual experience and the repeated quiet experiences of body care that gradually build up what may be called satisfactory personalization.”
Winnicott: “It is the innumerable failures followed by the sort of care that mends [,:] that build up into a communication of love, of the fact that there is a human being there who cares.”
*Impingement. “Impingements” interfere with the baby’s healthy development. By “impingement” Winnicott means anything that disrupts the infant’s life of womblike comfort—including both neglect, during which the infant’s unsatisfied needs impinge on its comfort, and “seduction,” in which for whatever reason the mother invades the infant’s quiet time.
The most important thing about impingements is that they compel the infant to react.
Unintegration is the precursor of the adult capacity to relax [and to be alone:].
If [the mother:] compels the infant to integrate too frequently or too precociously, a reactive False Self will emerge.
…overall self-development requires a subtle and individual balance between appropriate arousal and quiescence.
*Regression to Dependence. Winnicott identified two categories of psychosis: 1) distortions of ego organization leading to schizoid personality (as a defense against overwhelming anxiety), and 2) development of a rigidly false self that is mistaken for the whole child (“Because the true self has no relationship to external reality under these circumstances, life becomes futile.”). Winnicott contends that both types of psychosis are triggered by deficient early mothering. And how treat such people who later come for therapy? By “regression to dependence”—creating a safe therapeutic environment (a “holding environment”) in which the patient can regress and experience for the first time a “good enough mother” in the person of the therapist. Unlike Freud and Klein, for severely disturbed patients Winnicott emphasized nurturing presence over interpretation, reckoning that until their fundamental anxieties are relieved the patients will be unable to benefit from the “talk therapy” designed for and suited to otherwise-functional neurotics. Key for the therapist: weather unflinchingly, and thereby facilitate integration of, the patient’s rage (over having been poorly mothered) that has been “split off” from the personality or concealed behind his False Self.
Trust…is the confidence gained by the analyst’s survival of the patient’s destructiveness.
For Winnicott, psychotherapy was essentially a complex derivative of mother’s face, affording the opportunity to experience oneself as alive and real.
I have focused on Winnicott’s ideas rather than on Winnicott, whereas In Search of the Real relates the man’s ideas to his life. The book is a good read and much richer than I have been able to indicate, for those interested in Winnicott, in Object Relations theory or therapy, or in the relationship between mother and infant.
What were Winnicott’s salient ideas?
*The Real. For Winnicott the most important thing for humans was to be real rather than unreal, to be true to self rather than false, to live rather than merely to exist. And what did being real mean?
The notion of the real is about being alive, creative, spontaneous, and playful; cherishing one’s uniqueness; accepting one’s insignificance; tolerating one’s own destructive impulses; living with one’s own insanity; feeling integrated while retaining the capacity for unintegration; being receptive and open and knowing how to make use of the world without needing to react to it; finding and contributing to the inherited cultural tradition; tolerating one’s essential isolation without fleeing to false relationships or retreating into deleterious insulation. A healthy individual, in Winnicott’s mind, was one who felt real and whole without denying the potential to come undone and feel unreal.
*Creativity First. Unlike Freud and Klein, DWW felt that in humans the creativity of aliveness antedated (in development) the basic instincts and in fact constituted the individual’s prototypic core—that the developing infant essentially creates his own world as he goes along, like a tiny god uniquely integrating diverse elements, and that throughout life this underlying creativity is essential to mental health.
It is vitally important, Winnicott believed, that the infant be allowed to enjoy its true creative potential and bask in the naïve belief that the world is personally created.
For Freud, the baby’s central task was to recognize and accept external reality; for Winnicott, it was to find healthy ways of creating reality. For Freud, reality was a frustrating blow from which people never truly recover; for Winnicott, reality afforded relief and satisfaction from the alarming effects of unbridled fantasy.
*True Self/False Self. Winnicott believed that everyone starts with a true, creative self that feels vital and alive, but that each infant develops a false self (akin to Jung’s “persona”) to survive in the inherently alien world. The false self is necessary to protect the person from the hard edges of reality, and causes little problem so long as the person remains in close contact with his/her real self. But as Winnicott discovered after treating many patients suffering from a pervasive sense of unreality, mental health is endangered when a person loses touch with the real self and totally identifies with the false self.
It is the True Self…that is characterized by the feeling of genuine and authentic wholeness.
[Mother:] must…allow the baby to experience the full force of its own natural zest. The integrity of baby’s separateness must be respected by allowing for its natural instinctive rhythms.
In a sense, Winnicott’s entire developmental theory…is an effort to chart the subtle shifts in the quality of the dialectic between invisible oneness and individuality.
*Holding Environment. It is the mother who creates the “holding environment” that dictates whether the infant will develop the proper balance between the true self and the false self—i.e. whether the baby will develop into a mentally healthy or unhealthy adult. This she does above all by being reliable in caring for the infant.
It is…in the very earliest stages of development that mother facilitates, through her dependability, the capacity to feel real. Certain degrees of failure or chaotic adaptation to the child’s needs will undermine the potential to feel real. Mother is internalized by the infant not only as an object, but as a total environment. The confidence to feel real is evidence of the dependability of that environment. What is more, the mother must allow the infant to bask in the naïve belief that the world is personally created. Winnicott goes beyond the Freudian notion of sublimation and posits a primary creativity or absolute originality that is the psychological root which enables an individual, given good-enough maternal care, to have a sense of the reality of any experience or object.
…[mother:] not only had to facilitate True Self expression but she had to allow for and protect the fundamental isolation of the core of the personality.
*The Good-Enough Mother. No mother can be perfect (from the standpoint of the baby). She cannot always instantly satisfiy the baby’s needs. She cannot be perfectly reliable. But according to Winnicott it is all right to be “good enough”: to be sufficiently reliable to earn the baby’s trust, to allow it to feel confident in the environment and therefore to develop a feeling of safety and comfort that will eventually give it the confidence to separate from mother without excessive fear or pain.
The mother’s active human reliability is an essential foundation of all beliefs. By allowing the baby to go easily to and fro between states of integration and relaxed unintegration, the mother silently facilitates the infant’s belief in its own inner processes.
Winnicott: “It is the instinctual experience and the repeated quiet experiences of body care that gradually build up what may be called satisfactory personalization.”
Winnicott: “It is the innumerable failures followed by the sort of care that mends [,:] that build up into a communication of love, of the fact that there is a human being there who cares.”
*Impingement. “Impingements” interfere with the baby’s healthy development. By “impingement” Winnicott means anything that disrupts the infant’s life of womblike comfort—including both neglect, during which the infant’s unsatisfied needs impinge on its comfort, and “seduction,” in which for whatever reason the mother invades the infant’s quiet time.
The most important thing about impingements is that they compel the infant to react.
Unintegration is the precursor of the adult capacity to relax [and to be alone:].
If [the mother:] compels the infant to integrate too frequently or too precociously, a reactive False Self will emerge.
…overall self-development requires a subtle and individual balance between appropriate arousal and quiescence.
*Regression to Dependence. Winnicott identified two categories of psychosis: 1) distortions of ego organization leading to schizoid personality (as a defense against overwhelming anxiety), and 2) development of a rigidly false self that is mistaken for the whole child (“Because the true self has no relationship to external reality under these circumstances, life becomes futile.”). Winnicott contends that both types of psychosis are triggered by deficient early mothering. And how treat such people who later come for therapy? By “regression to dependence”—creating a safe therapeutic environment (a “holding environment”) in which the patient can regress and experience for the first time a “good enough mother” in the person of the therapist. Unlike Freud and Klein, for severely disturbed patients Winnicott emphasized nurturing presence over interpretation, reckoning that until their fundamental anxieties are relieved the patients will be unable to benefit from the “talk therapy” designed for and suited to otherwise-functional neurotics. Key for the therapist: weather unflinchingly, and thereby facilitate integration of, the patient’s rage (over having been poorly mothered) that has been “split off” from the personality or concealed behind his False Self.
Trust…is the confidence gained by the analyst’s survival of the patient’s destructiveness.
For Winnicott, psychotherapy was essentially a complex derivative of mother’s face, affording the opportunity to experience oneself as alive and real.
I have focused on Winnicott’s ideas rather than on Winnicott, whereas In Search of the Real relates the man’s ideas to his life. The book is a good read and much richer than I have been able to indicate, for those interested in Winnicott, in Object Relations theory or therapy, or in the relationship between mother and infant.
January 30, 2022
People have told me this guy is back “in” which I could kind of see making sense in generationally, as childhood becomes a more abstract, expansive and identity centric experience for those lucky (or less fortunate) to be born in this day and age. I don’t know if that’s a polite way of describing what I observe, working as a teacher, from the children whose sense of navigating their own reality is hyper idiosyncratic, who seemingly never hear the word “no” at home. His observation heavy model is fascinating as is his belief that sanity shouldn’t be a necessary goal of the analysis w/r/t their own thinking. I’m looking forward to reading The Piggle next.
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