Donald Winnicott

Winnicott was born in Plymouth, Devon, on 7 April 1896, into a devoutly Methodist family active in civic life. His father, John Frederick Winnicott, was a partner in the family hardware business and twice mayor of Plymouth, and was knighted in 1924. His mother, Elizabeth Martha Woods, was the daughter of a Plymouth chemist. He grew up with two sisters and a nanny, and later described his childhood as an effort to make his living by keeping his depressive mother alive.

At The Leys School in Cambridge he first thought of medicine, after breaking his collarbone. He went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1914 to study biology, physiology and anatomy. During the First World War he worked as a medical trainee in a temporary hospital in Cambridge. In 1917 he joined the Royal Navy as a medical officer on the destroyer HMS Lucifer. He went on to clinical studies at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London and qualified in 1920.

In 1923 he married the potter Alice Taylor; they divorced in 1949. In 1951 he married Clare Britton, a psychiatric social worker who had been his colleague during the Second World War and later became a psychoanalyst. She oversaw several of his posthumous publications.

Also in 1923 he began a psychoanalysis with James Strachey that lasted about ten years, and in 1927 he began his analytic training. On Strachey's advice he sought out Melanie Klein to supervise his first child analytic case. He qualified as a child analyst in 1935, and Klein went on supervising his child cases for some years. His membership paper of that year, "The Manic Defence", drew on her account of early infantile life (The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment²). In 1936 he began a second analysis, with Joan Riviere, which lasted into the early 1940s.

Winnicott was appointed to Paddington Green Children's Hospital around 1923 and worked there as a paediatrician and child psychoanalyst for forty years. The title of his first collection of papers, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis³ (1958), traces this route. Its early papers, addressed largely to doctors, argue that much of what paediatrics treated as physical illness expressed anxiety and emotional conflict. Examples include fidgetiness mistaken for rheumatic chorea, disorders of appetite and symptoms of the eyes. Anxiety in a child, these papers argue, is often normal and to be tolerated rather than removed.

In "The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation" (1941) he described how infants on their mother's lap deal with a shining spatula left within their reach. The hesitation before seizing it, the mouthing and play, and the dropping make up a sequence whose departures reveal the infant's anxieties. The consultation itself can be therapeutic. With older children he used the squiggle game, in which he drew a shape for the child to extend, or the child drew one for him.

During the Second World War Winnicott served as consultant paediatrician to the children's evacuation programme. Between 1943 and 1966 he gave more than sixty talks on BBC radio, beginning with a 1943 series called "Happy Children".

The Controversial Discussions of the war years ended in a compromise between three groups within the British Psycho-Analytical Society: the Anna Freudians, the Kleinians, and the Middle, later Independent, Group. Winnicott belonged to the Middle Group, as did Ronald Fairbairn, Michael Balint and John Bowlby, among others. He was president of the Society from 1956 to 1959 and again from 1965 to 1968. He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and in 1968 he received the James Spence Medal.

He analysed Harry Guntrip, who came to him in London after his analysis with Fairbairn, intermittently from 1962 to 1968. Winnicott died in London on 25 January 1971, after the last of a series of heart attacks.

The ground of Winnicott's theory is that the infant cannot be described apart from the care it receives. In The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship⁴ (1960) he argued that the infant and its maternal care form a single unit, and that the infant's inherited potential becomes a person only in conjunction with that care. He took his starting point from Sigmund Freud's remark of 1911. A being ruled by the pleasure principle, Freud said, could survive only if the care it receives from its mother is counted as part of it.

Winnicott traced a sequence of dependence: absolute dependence, relative dependence and a movement towards independence. He called its first stage 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. It includes protection from physiological insult, adaptation to the infant's particular sensitivities, and a daily routine that follows the small changes of growth.

The mother's capacity to provide it rests on her identification with her baby rather than on instruction. In "Primary Maternal Preoccupation" (1956) he described the heightened identification with the newborn that makes this possible (Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis³). Good-enough holding safeguards the infant's continuity of being. Impingements force the infant to react, and reacting interrupts that continuity and threatens annihilation.

The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment² (1965), his second collection, gathers papers mostly from 1957 to 1963. It sets this theory out in mature form. Every infant carries inherited tendencies towards integration, towards the psyche's dwelling in the body, and towards relating to objects. These maturational processes become actual only where an environment makes room for them. When provision fails at the earliest stage, the infant meets not frustration but impingement, which exposes it to unthinkable anxieties.

The same book develops the capacity to be alone, which is acquired, paradoxically, by being alone in the presence of the mother. It also develops the capacity for concern, Winnicott's reworking of Klein's depressive position as a normal developmental achievement. And it holds that each person keeps an isolated, non-communicating core with a right not to be reached.

Winnicott read Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena⁵ to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in May 1951, and it was published in 1953. The paper starts from a familiar observation. Some months after birth most infants become attached to one particular object, a piece of blanket, a napkin or a soft toy, which their parents learn to respect. Between inner psychic reality and the external world, Winnicott proposed a third, intermediate area of experiencing to which both contribute and whose status is never challenged.

The transitional object belongs to this area. To an observer it comes from outside, but to the infant it neither comes from outside nor is a hallucination. It stands for the breast or the mother, yet 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 Klein's sense but a possession, and it keeps its meaning only while the internal object stays alive and good enough. That in turn depends on the real mother remaining reliable.

The paper's theoretical core is a theory of illusion. At first the good-enough mother adapts almost completely to her infant's needs. The breast then appears where and when the infant is ready to create it, and the infant has the illusion of having made it. Her later task is gradual disillusionment, as her adaptation lessens in step with the infant's growing tolerance of frustration. The paradox at the heart 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 loses its meaning as transitional phenomena spread over the whole cultural field. The intermediate area carries the small child's absorbed play into adult life as the arts, religion, imaginative living and creative scientific work. Winnicott also sketched its psychopathology, reading addiction, the fetish, and lying and stealing in relation to it.

A revised version of the paper opens Playing and Reality¹. There "The Location of Cultural Experience" (1967) and later chapters place cultural experience in the potential space between baby and mother.

In papers collected in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment² Winnicott distinguished a true self, the source of spontaneity and of feeling real, from a false self. The false self is built on compliance and shields the true self. False-self organizations range from healthy social compliance to cases in which the false self is taken for the whole person. Winnicott acknowledged that the idea had forerunners in earlier analytic writing.

An earlier paper, "Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma" (1949), treated an overactive mind as a substitute for care that had failed (Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis³). Playing and Reality¹ carried the theme further. It contrasts creative apperception, which makes life feel worth living, with a compliance that leaves a sense of futility. It also distinguishes a female element, tied to being, from a male element, tied to doing, in people of either sex, and describes the mother's face as the first mirror in which the infant sees itself.

Hate in the Counter-Transference⁶, dated 1947 and published in 1949, examines the hate that analysts, psychiatrists and mental nurses feel towards their patients. Work with psychotic and antisocial patients, Winnicott argued, becomes impossible unless the analyst's own hate is "extremely well sorted-out and conscious".

He distinguished three kinds of countertransference: abnormal feelings and identifications under repression in the analyst, which call for more analysis; identifications from the analyst's personal history, which give the work its character; and a "truly objective counter-transference". This last is the analyst's love and hate in reaction to the patient's actual personality and behaviour, the idea recorded here as objective countertransference.

The core of the paper is an analogy between the analyst of a deeply regressed patient and the mother of a newborn. The infant, before integration, loves with a ruthless love, while the mother "hates her infant from the word go". She must tolerate this hate without acting on it. Likewise a psychotic patient cannot be expected to tolerate his hate of the analyst unless the analyst can hate him. As Winnicott put it: "If the patient seeks objective or justified hate he must be able to reach it, else he cannot feel he can reach objective love." He illustrated the point with a wartime evacuee, a habitual runaway, whom he and his wife took into their home.

Winnicott carried his developmental scheme into technique. The papers on technique in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment² order mental disorders by the stage of dependence at which the environment failed. They treat the analytic setting as a holding environment that may have to carry a regression to dependence. In papers on regression from 1954 he argued that patients whose earliest care failed may need such a regression within a reliable setting, which comes to stand for that care (Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis³). Such patients need from analysis less the interpretation of instinctual conflict than a setting in which their dependence can be met. There the analyst's understanding itself works as a form of holding (The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship⁴).

"The Antisocial Tendency" (1956) read stealing and destructiveness in deprived children as signs of hope.

Playing and Reality¹, published shortly after his death, treats playing as a universal activity, the basis of health and the medium of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, in this view, takes place where the playing of patient and therapist overlap, and where a patient cannot play the first task is to make playing possible. Only in playing, Winnicott argued, can a person be creative and use the whole personality, and only in being creative is the self found.

The book's chapter on the use of an object was first presented in New York in 1968 and published in 1969. It separates relating to an object, which is still under the subject's omnipotent control, from using it. Use becomes possible only after the subject destroys the object in fantasy and the object survives, which places it in a world of shared reality.

Winnicott regarded his ideas as growing out of Freud's psychoanalysis rather than departing from it. His 1962 appraisal of Klein, collected in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment², credits her contribution. It faults her for underrating the infant's dependence on what the environment provides.

From the Kleinian side, his rejection of envy and the death drive could look like a retreat from the harsh realities Klein had found in infant life, while others found him too close to Klein. Critics have also charged that his theoretical stance identified with an idealized mother. Some have seen a Romantic cult of childhood play in his work, and a theory of true and false self shaped by his own experience of caring for a depressed mother. Jan Abram has linked his long absence from mainstream analytic trainings to his everyday language and his focus on the environment.

His influence has been wide. Thomas Ogden built on his transitional area and potential space in On Potential Space⁷ and The Matrix of the Mind⁸. Winnicott shaped André Green's thinking on borderline states, analytic technique and the transitional area, as in Le Travail du négatif⁹.

His paper on the use of an object, with its destruction and survival of the other, is a cornerstone of Jessica Benjamin's theory of recognition in The Bonds of Love¹⁰ and An Outline of Intersubjectivity¹¹. Harold Searles cited him often and returned repeatedly to his transitional phenomena. R. D. Laing wrote to him in 1958 acknowledging his help, and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has championed his work.

Winnicott's first book was Clinical Notes on Disorders of Childhood (1931). His psychoanalytic papers were gathered in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis³ (1958) and The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment² (1965). His key papers include Hate in the Counter-Transference⁶ (1949), Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena⁵ (1953) and The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship⁴ (1960).

His writings for parents include The Child, the Family and the Outside World (1964). In the year of his death appeared Playing and Reality¹, Therapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry and The Piggle.

Posthumous volumes include Deprivation and Delinquency (1984), Holding and Interpretation (1986) and Human Nature (1988). His Collected Works were published by Oxford University Press in 2016.