Symptom–1
Interestingly enough, the distinction between fantasying and dreaming and its accompanying language of the “dead end” were not without their parallels for Winnicott. In a series of talks he recorded for the BBC during the 1950s (collected and published under the title of The Child, the Family and the Outside World), and hence from the period shortly after the first appearance of “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” Winnicott flagged “abnormality” as neither a statistical deviation nor a behavioural aberration but as the stagnation in a child’s ability to grow in personality and character. An abnormal child, declared Winnicott, is a child that gets “hung up at some spot” (CFOW, 124) and can go no further in his or her movements and interactions; a normal child, on the other hand, “can employ any or all of the devices nature has provided in defence against anxiety and intolerable conflict” (CFOW, 126-7; emphasis in the original). Consequently, in and of themselves, individual behaviours are neither normal nor abnormal; bed-wetting, for instance, is often an effective protest against strict management while the refusal of food may very well be a rejection of what is experienced as bad. With an ill child, “it is not the symptoms that are the trouble; it is the fact that the symptoms are not doing their job, and are as much a nuisance to the child as to the mother” (CFOW, 127). “Abnormality [Winnicott continues] shows in a limitation and a rigidity in the child’s capacity to employ symptoms and a relative lack of relationship between the symptoms and what can be expected in the way of help” (CFOW, 127; emphasis in the original). Winnicott’s parental concern(∗) was hence focused not on any one particular type or quality of behaviour but on the extent to which a child can use any behaviour, deploy it, and eventually communicate through it. In one respect at least, the psychoanalytic distinction between dreaming and fantasying extends well this concern: dreaming is an index of mobility and interaction that produces its own effects, be they playful, concrete, or illusory, while fantasying is an insular and debilitating end in itself; it brings forth nothing and leads nowhere. Put differently, dreaming grows while fantasying remains “hung up.”
However, and as is often the case with the passage from one reality to another or from one modality to another, Winnicott’s clinical passage from the parental to the psychoanalytic might not have been possible without his reliance on certain less obvious but by no means less critical conceptual considerations. In the spirit of the transitional, one would have to entertain the necessity of such considerations and locate them in the interregnum that is the boundary between the parental and the psychoanalytic as two distinct practices, each with its own standards in matters of procedure, investment, and membership. Curiously, and to my knowledge at least, Winnicott remained silent on the fact of this interregnum and on the conditions and techniques that would make crossing it possible. The effect of this silence is that it reinforces in the reader an impression already sustained by the psychoanalyst’s overarching investment in a clinical practice that, at bottom, is homologous with, if not identical to, parenting, an impression, hence, of a crossing that is effectively a non-event or, at most, an event that occurs with such ease while hardly drawing any attention to itself that it may very well be the symptom of the healthiest and most normal of procedures that are the devices, again, “nature [clinical training] has provided the child [therapist] in defence against anxiety and intolerable conflict [incomprehension and contradiction]” (CFOW, 126-7)! In the face of such “normality,” silence is presumably the most obvious response. However, in response to such a silence, one has a psychoanalytic obligation to ponder the possibility of some underlying anxiety or conflict, assess their eventual impact, and perhaps even investigate the likelihood of responding to them in a way other than the child’s.
Meanwhile, and ever true to his principles, Winnicott was all too keen on propagating this “normality.” Indeed, and with the doctor’s encouragement, it seems as if little need stand in the way of parents becoming their own children’s therapists, as in the case of the mother whose boy suffered from a host of “curious symptoms,” including a most notable obsession with everything to do with strings, for instance. In helping transpose the process of appreciation, verbalisation, and learning from the one dyad (therapist-parent) to the other (parent-child), Winnicott claimed credit for enabling that mother to turn to her little boy and interpret—as a therapist might interpret—his anxiously exaggerated use of a transitional object (a piece of string) by declaring with a confidence and competence that are most inspiring (!) “I can see from your playing with string that you are worried about my going away, but this time I shall only be away a few days, and I am having an operation which is not serious” (TOTP-2, 18). As one might expect, the interpretation yielded the therapeutic response of relieving the boy from his anxiety on the eve of a temporary separation from mother.
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∗ I am opting for the label “parental” as opposed to “paediatric” here because, in the BBC lectures at least, Winnicott the paediatrician was addressing himself as (if he were) a parent to the parents, mostly mothers—as opposed to doctors—encouraging them to trust in the knowledge they have garnered from their experiences of parenting—instead of touting his authority in matters clinical of which they may be ignorant—and, finally, delicately feeding them, as a parent would its offspring, titbits of theory and observation that would make of them even better parents—rather than instructing them in the complexities of diagnosis and treatment.
