Concept
Holding environment
The whole of the physical and emotional care through which a mother, in the earliest stage of life, shields her infant from impingements: she holds the baby physically and also keeps its experience in mind over time. Winnicott described a holding phase of development and saw the analytic setting as offering a comparably reliable environment, especially to patients who regress to dependence.
Development
1960
introduced by Donald Winnicott
Describes the holding phase of infancy and the maternal care that holds the infant before mother and baby can live as two separate people.
In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (1965);The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship (1960)
2004
developed by Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden distinguished Winnicott's holding from Bion's containing. On his reading, holding is the ontological work of sustaining the patient's continuity of being over time, while containing is the work of processing experience.
In On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming (2004)
Relations
- 1960 introduced by Donald Winnicott
Describes the holding phase of infancy and the maternal care that holds the infant before mother and baby can live as two separate people.
- 2004 developed by Thomas H. Ogden
Ogden distinguished Winnicott's holding from Bion's containing. On his reading, holding is the ontological work of sustaining the patient's continuity of being over time, while containing is the work of processing experience.
- derives from Good-enough mother
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
- 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.
- 1965
The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1965) is Donald Winnicott's second collection of psychoanalytic papers, following Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958). Its twenty-three essays, written mostly between 1957 and 1963 and arranged in two parts, "Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development" and "Theory and Technique", present his developmental theory in its mature form. The title states the book's argument. Every infant carries inherited tendencies to grow: towards integration, towards the psyche's indwelling in the body, towards relating to objects. These maturational processes become actual only where an environment makes room for them. At first that environment is the mother in a state of primary maternal preoccupation, who adapts almost completely to her infant's needs and then, as the infant becomes able to bear it, gradually adapts less. Winnicott traces development from absolute dependence through relative dependence towards independence, and treats the mother's holding, handling and presenting of objects as the provisions on which integration, personalization and object-relating rest. When provision fails at the earliest stage, the infant meets not frustration but impingement, which breaks its continuity of being and exposes it to unthinkable anxieties. On this ground the book develops several of Winnicott's best-known ideas: the distinction between a true self, the source of spontaneity and of feeling real, and a false self built on compliance to shield it; the capacity to be alone, acquired paradoxically by being alone in the mother's presence; the capacity for concern, his reworking of Melanie Klein's depressive position; and the claim that each person keeps an isolated, non-communicating core with a right not to be reached. The papers on technique carry the developmental scheme into the clinic. Mental disorders are ordered by the stage of dependence at which the environment failed; the analytic setting is understood as a holding environment that may have to carry a regression to dependence; and the aims of treatment, the meaning of counter-transference, Klein's contribution, and the treatment of character disorders and the antisocial tendency are reconsidered in that light.
- 2004
On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming
Ogden observes that Winnicott's holding and Bion's container-contained, though among the most important contributions of each, are often misunderstood and confused with each other. He sets out what he takes to be the essential features of each and illustrates how he uses them clinically. Holding, in his reading, is an ontological concept, concerned above all with being and its relation to time: at first the mother safeguards the infant's continuity of being, in part by shielding the infant from the 'not-me' quality of time, and as the infant matures this holding of continuity through time and emotional change is gradually internalised. Container-contained, by contrast, concerns the processing, or 'dreaming', of thoughts that derive from lived emotional experience: it describes the interplay between thoughts, mostly unconscious (the contained), and the capacity to dream and think them (the container).
See also
People
References
- The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development1965Evidence for a relation
- The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship1960Evidence for a relation
- On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming2004Evidence for a relation