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.