It is often held that while Freud had very little by way of infant observation, Winnicott fortified his analytic work with a hefty dose of paediatric observation and insight. Except for the fort-da and Little Hans, Freud had to reconstruct infantile sexuality from the distorted impressions of adult neurotics. Winnicott, for his part, or so the story goes, spent a great deal of time watching mothers and their infants; he, supposedly, went straight to the source. Such a view is not only inaccurate, it is also disingenuous and by the account of none other than Winnicott himself who writes:
it is not from direct observation of infants so much as from the study of transference in the analytic setting that it is possible to gain a clear view of what takes place in infancy itself. This work on infantile dependence derives from the study of transference and counter-transference phenomena that belong to the psychoanalyst’s involvement with the borderline case … Freud was able to discover infantile sexuality in a new way because he reconstructed it from his analytic work with psycho-neurotic patients. In extending his work to cover the treatment of the borderline psychotic patient it is possible for us to reconstruct the dynamics of infancy and of infantile dependence, and the maternal care that meets this dependence. (“The Theory of The Parent-Infant Relationship,” 54-5)
The reconstructive basis of Winnicott’s work does not so much negate its validity; but it does highlight a built-in ideological bias as to the nature of good mothering and, by extension, for Winnicott at least, good psychoanalysing. A good mother is the one who secures for her infant an environment that is protective, holding, and providing—empathically rather than mechanistically. She does so without being instructed and while being totally unaware of the theory. In fact, for Winnicott, ignorance is bliss here and practice makes anything but perfect:
[M]others who have had several children begin to be so good at the technique of mothering that they do all the right things at the right moments, and then the infant who has begun to become separate from the mother has no means of gaining control of all the good things that are going on … In this way the mother, by being a seemingly good mother, does something worse than castrate the infant. The latter is left with two alternatives: either being in a permanent state of regression and of being merged with the mother, or else staging a total rejection of the mother, even of the seemingly good mother. (“The Theory …” 51)
Winnicott’s mother is trapped in a dilemma: she cannot be instructed in the art of good mothering while her failure at securing the necessary environmental provisions for her child is identified as a significant contributing factor to infantile psychosis or a liability to psychosis at a later date. Winnicott benignly refers to this dilemma in responsibility as “strange” and his awed followers see his ability to identify it in such terms as testimony to his “paradoxical” thinking.
Interestingly enough, such sophistication in insight and judgement was almost entirely lacking when, as head of a 1953 IPA mission to assess the eligibility of Lacan’s Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) for IPA affiliation, Winnicott characterized the work of some of the SFP’s most experienced and innovative child analysts (among them Françoise Dolto) as “harmful” since their work supposedly relied on too much intuition and not enough “method” (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co. 318-59). Apparently, and while insisting on an intrinsic parallel between the two processes, Winnicott held that method and perfection are harmful for mothering but most necessary for psychoanalysing. Perhaps that too is … “paradoxical.”
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Roudinesco, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Winnicott, D. W.. “The Theory of The Parent-Infant Relationship” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth, 1965.
