The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development

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.