Concept
Primary maternal preoccupation
A state of heightened sensitivity which, in Winnicott's account, develops in the mother towards the end of pregnancy and lasts for some weeks after the birth, in which she identifies so closely with her baby that she can sense and meet its needs. He compared it to a normal, passing illness from which she recovers as the infant comes to need her less.
Development
1956
introduced by Donald Winnicott
In Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958)
Relations
Works
- 1958
Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis
Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis is the first collection of D. W. Winnicott's papers, published by Tavistock in London in 1958 and reissued in 1975, with an introduction by M. Masud R. Khan, as Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. It gathers twenty-six papers written between 1931 and 1956, and its title traces Winnicott's own route: a physician at Paddington Green Children's Hospital who trained as a psychoanalyst, he brought what he observed in many thousands of consultations with mothers and infants to bear on psychoanalytic theory, and brought psychoanalysis back to paediatrics. The earlier papers are addressed largely to doctors. They argue that much of what paediatrics treated as physical illness — fidgetiness mistaken for rheumatic chorea, disorders of appetite, ocular symptoms — expresses anxiety and emotional conflict, and that anxiety in a child is often normal and to be tolerated rather than removed. In "The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation" (1941) Winnicott describes how infants on their mother's lap deal with a shining spatula left within reach: the hesitation before seizing it, the mouthing and play, the dropping. Departures from this sequence reveal the infant's anxieties, and the consultation itself can be therapeutic. Other papers describe a child's precocious liveliness as reparation directed at a mother's depression rather than at the child's own guilt, and consider when a child's illness can be managed by the family at home. The later papers, most of them given to the British Psycho-Analytical Society, set out the theory for which Winnicott is known. He starts from Melanie Klein's work on the manic defence and the depressive position, which he recasts as the normal achievement of a capacity for concern, and increasingly places the environment — the mother's adaptation to her infant — at the centre of early development. "Primitive Emotional Development" (1945) describes integration, personalization and the realization of external reality emerging from an original unintegration. "Hate in the Counter-Transference" (1947) argues that the analyst, like the mother, must be able to recognize hate without acting on it. "Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma" (1949) treats an overactive mind as a substitute for care that failed. "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena" (1951) introduces the first "not-me" possession and an intermediate area of experience between the subjective and the objectively perceived. Papers on regression (1954) argue that patients whose earliest care failed may need to regress to dependence within a reliable analytic setting, which comes to stand for that care. Among the last papers are "Primary Maternal Preoccupation" (1956), on the mother's heightened identification with her newborn, and "The Antisocial Tendency" (1956), which reads stealing and destructiveness in deprived children as signs of hope.
See also
People
References
- Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis1958Evidence for a relation