Book
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.
Main ideas
- Maturational processes need a facilitating environment: the infant's inherited tendencies to grow are realised only through care that meets them, so that the infant and its maternal care form a single unit and a theory of the infant must be a theory of the parent-infant relationship.
- Development runs from absolute dependence, through relative dependence, towards an independence that is never complete. The good-enough mother, in primary maternal preoccupation, first adapts almost wholly to the infant and then adapts less, at a pace the infant can make use of.
- Holding, handling and object-presenting are the maternal provisions that correspond to the infant's integration, personalization (the psyche coming to dwell in the body) and capacity to relate to objects; the mother's ego support is what makes the infant's ego strong.
- Failures of adaptation during absolute dependence are not felt as frustration but as impingements that interrupt the infant's continuity of being, exposing it to unthinkable anxieties such as going to pieces, falling for ever, having no relation to the body and having no orientation.
- The true self is the source of spontaneous gesture and of feeling real. When the mother repeatedly fails to meet the infant's gesture and substitutes her own, the infant complies and builds a false self that hides and protects the true one; false-self organisations range from a pathological front mistaken for the whole person to the ordinary social manners of health.
- The capacity to be alone is a mark of emotional maturity, and it rests on a paradox: it is acquired through the experience, in infancy, of being alone while someone reliable is present, a relatedness between egos in which the infant can rest unintegrated and find its own impulses real.
- The capacity for concern, Winnicott's reworking of Klein's depressive position, develops as the infant brings together the object-mother it uses ruthlessly in excitement and the environment-mother who cares for it. When the mother survives and accepts the infant's reparative gestures over time, the guilt this union brings becomes concern and responsibility.
- Each person has an isolated core that is never communicated and must not be reached or altered from outside. Healthy development includes a right not to communicate alongside the wish to be found, and the analyst must respect this silent core rather than intrude on it.
- Psychiatric disorder can be classified by the stage of dependence at which the environment failed: psychotic illness goes back to failure in absolute dependence; the antisocial tendency and character disorders go back to deprivation, the loss of good provision once had, and the antisocial act carries a hope that the environment will make good the loss; psychoneurosis arises from conflict between whole persons after good-enough early care.
- In technique, the analytic setting functions as a holding environment whose reliability can matter as much as interpretation, especially with patients who regress to dependence. Winnicott restricts counter-transference to the analyst's own disturbances that spoil the professional attitude, and holds that when a patient cannot use analysis the analyst should knowingly provide what the patient needs instead.
- The sense of guilt is a developmental achievement that depends on tolerating ambivalence within a reliable relationship. Morality likewise grows from within a child who has been cared for well enough; moral teaching imposed on a child without that foundation produces compliance rather than conscience.
What it shows
- 1935
Melanie Klein supervised Donald Winnicott
On Strachey's advice Winnicott sought out Klein as supervisor of his first child analytic case. He qualified as a child analyst in 1935, and she went on supervising his child cases for some years.
- 1935
Melanie Klein influenced Donald Winnicott
Klein's account of early infantile life shaped Winnicott's membership paper 'The Manic Defence' (1935) and his early analytic thinking, even as he later moved away from her.
- 1962
Donald Winnicott disputed with Melanie Klein
From the 1940s Winnicott moved away from Kleinian theory. In his 1962 appraisal he credits Klein's contribution but faults her for underrating the infant's dependence on what the environment provides.
- 1960
Donald Winnicott introduced Holding environment
Describes the holding phase of infancy and the maternal care that holds the infant before mother and baby can live as two separate people.
- 1960
Donald Winnicott introduced True self
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- 1960
Donald Winnicott introduced False self
Winnicott ranged false-self organisations from healthy social compliance to cases where the false self is taken for the whole person, and acknowledged that the idea had forerunners in earlier analytic writing.
- 1958
Donald Winnicott introduced Capacity to be alone
False self opposes True self
The two are defined as a pair: the false self forms out of compliance with an environment that fails the infant, and it shields and hides the true self.