Concept
Good-enough mother
Winnicott's term for the ordinary mother, or other caregiver, who at first adapts almost completely to the infant's needs and then, as the infant can bear it, gradually adapts less. Her measured failures, rather than flawless care, let the infant meet reality, tolerate frustration and come to experience the mother as a separate person.
Development
1953
introduced by Donald Winnicott
Set out in the transitional objects paper, where the good-enough mother's graduated failure of adaptation leads the infant from illusion to disillusionment.
In Playing and Reality (1971);Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession (1953)
Relations
- 1953 introduced by Donald Winnicott
Set out in the transitional objects paper, where the good-enough mother's graduated failure of adaptation leads the infant from illusion to disillusionment.
- gave rise to Holding environment
Holding names the environmental provision that the good-enough mother gives in the earliest phase, before the infant can tell itself apart from her.
Works
- 1953
Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession
"Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession" is a paper by Donald Winnicott. He read it to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in May 1951, and it was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1953. It introduced two of his best-known concepts, the transitional object and the good-enough mother. A revised and enlarged version opens his book Playing and Reality (1971). Winnicott starts from a familiar observation. Newborns put their fists and fingers in their mouths, and some months later most infants become attached to one particular object, such as a piece of blanket, a napkin or a soft toy, which their parents learn to respect. He studies what lies between these two stages: between thumb and teddy bear, between oral erotism and a true object relationship, between the infant's primary creativity and its recognition of what comes from outside. The usual account divides the person into two parts, an inner psychic reality and an external world. Winnicott adds a third: an intermediate area of experiencing to which both contribute and whose status is never challenged. Transitional phenomena, such as a babbled sound, a tune or a gesture at bedtime, belong to this area, and so do transitional objects. They usually appear between about four and twelve months. They matter most when the infant is going to sleep and at moments of loneliness, and they serve as a defence against anxiety, especially depressive anxiety. The infant's relationship to the object has particular features: - The infant assumes rights over it. - It is cuddled, but also excitedly loved and mutilated. - It must not change unless the infant changes it. - It must survive love, hate and aggression. - It must seem to have warmth or a life of its own. To an observer the object comes from outside. To the infant it neither comes from outside nor is a hallucination. It stands for the breast or the mother, but the fact that it is not the breast matters as much as the fact that it represents it. It is the infant's first use of a symbol and its first experience of play. It is not an internal object in Melanie Klein's sense but a possession. It keeps its meaning only while the internal object stays alive and good enough, and that in turn depends on the real mother remaining reliable. The theoretical core of the paper is a theory of illusion. At first a "good-enough mother" adapts almost completely to the infant's needs, so that the breast appears where and when the infant is ready to create it. The infant has the illusion of having made it. Her later task is gradual disillusionment: her adaptation lessens as the infant becomes able to tolerate frustration. Disillusionment can succeed only where enough illusion was allowed first. The paradox at the centre of transitional experience is to be accepted, not resolved. No one asks the infant whether it created the object or found it. Normally the object is neither mourned nor forgotten. It gradually loses its meaning as transitional phenomena spread over the whole cultural field. Winnicott argues that the strain of relating inner to outer reality never ends. Relief comes from the intermediate area, which carries the small child's absorbed play into adult life as the arts, religion, imaginative living and creative scientific work. He therefore assigns a positive value to illusion. He also sketches the area's psychopathology: - Addiction is a regression to the stage at which transitional phenomena go unchallenged. - The fetish is the persistence of an infantile transitional object, a point he takes from Wulff. - Lying and stealing are attempts to bridge a break in the continuity of experience. The paper became one of the most influential in post-war psychoanalysis. It laid the ground for Winnicott's later writing on play, on culture, and on what he would come to call potential space.
- 1960
The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship
Winnicott's 1960 paper, published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and later collected in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965), argues that the earliest phase of life cannot be theorised from the infant alone: the infant and the maternal care it receives form a single unit, and the infant's inherited potential becomes a person only in conjunction with that care. He takes up Freud's remark of 1911 that a being ruled by the pleasure principle could survive only if the care it receives from its mother is counted as part of it, and he sets out a sequence of dependence — absolute dependence, relative dependence and a movement towards independence — whose first stage he calls the holding phase. Holding means not only physically holding the baby but the whole environmental provision that comes before any sense of living with another person: protection from physiological insult, adaptation to the infant's particular sensitivities, and a daily routine that follows the minute changes of growth. The mother's capacity to provide it rests on her identification with the infant rather than on instruction, and she later de-adapts gradually, so that failures reach the infant in doses it can use. Good-enough holding safeguards the infant's continuity of being; impingements force it to react, and reacting interrupts that continuity and threatens annihilation. Within holding the infant achieves integration, the psyche comes to dwell in the body, and relating to objects begins, until the infant becomes a unit with an inside and an outside. Winnicott treats the study of infancy and the study of the analytic transference as illuminating each other, and draws a clinical consequence: patients whose difficulties go back to failures at this stage need from analysis less the interpretation of instinctual conflict than a reliable setting in which their dependence can be met, and in which the analyst's understanding itself works as a form of holding.
- 1971
Playing and Reality (1971), published shortly after Donald Winnicott's death, gathers and extends his late thinking on the area of experience that lies between inner psychic reality and the shared external world. It opens with a revised version of his 1951 paper on transitional objects and transitional phenomena: the blanket, toy or tune an infant adopts as its first 'not-me' possession, which belongs neither wholly to the inner world nor wholly to the outer one. Winnicott insists that the paradox be respected: no one should ask the child whether the object was found or created. The capacity to use such an object depends on a good-enough mother who first lets the infant feel it creates what it needs, sustaining an illusion of omnipotence, and then gradually disillusions it. As the transitional object loses its meaning, the intermediate area it opened spreads over the whole field of play, art, religion and culture. The central chapters treat playing as a universal activity, the basis of health and the medium of psychotherapy, which in this view takes place where the playing of patient and therapist overlap; where a patient cannot play, the first task is to make playing possible. Only in playing, Winnicott argues, can a person be creative and use the whole personality, and only in being creative can the self be found. He contrasts creative apperception, which makes life feel worth living, with a compliance that leaves a sense of futility, and contrasts dreaming, which links to life, with a dissociated fantasying that leads nowhere. He distinguishes a female element, tied to being, from a male element, tied to doing, in people of either sex. In 'The Use of an Object' he separates relating to an object, still under the subject's omnipotent control, from using it, which becomes possible only after the subject destroys it in fantasy and it survives, and is thus placed in a world of shared reality. Further chapters locate cultural experience in the potential space between baby and mother, describe the mother's face as the first mirror in which the infant sees itself, and discuss adolescence as a period whose immaturity should be met rather than cured.
See also
People
References
- Playing and Reality1971Evidence for a relation
- Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession1953Evidence for a relation
- The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship1960Evidence for a relation