Article
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.
Main ideas
- The infant and the maternal care it receives form a single unit; the infant's inherited potential develops into a person only in conjunction with that care, so a theory of infancy must include the environment.
- Dependence passes from absolute dependence, in which the infant cannot know of the care it receives, through relative dependence, in which it becomes aware of that care and links it to its own impulses, towards independence.
- Holding is the whole environmental provision of the earliest phase: physical holding, protection from physiological insult and adaptation to the infant's particular sensitivities, changing day by day with its growth.
- The mother's adaptation rests on her identification with the infant rather than on instruction; her gradual de-adaptation lets the infant meet failures in doses it can use.
- Good-enough holding safeguards the infant's continuity of being; impingements compel it to react, and reacting interrupts being and threatens annihilation.
- Within holding the infant moves towards integration, the psyche comes to dwell in the body, and relating to objects begins, until the infant is a unit with an inside and an outside.
- The study of infancy and the study of the analytic transference illuminate each other: much of what analysts know of early dependence is learned from patients who regress in analysis.
- Patients whose difficulties go back to failures of holding need a reliable analytic setting in which dependence can be met, where the analyst's understanding itself works as holding, more than the interpretation of instinctual conflict.
What it shows
- 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.
Holding environment derives from Good-enough mother
Holding names the environmental provision that the good-enough mother gives in the earliest phase, before the infant can tell itself apart from her.