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Re-Parenting

        There is a side to Winnicott that the advocates of holding environments and good enough mothering would all too gladly see ignored.

        In his elaborations on the counter-transference, Winnicott distinguishes between three types of responses:

  1. a subjective counter-transference routed in the analyst’s un-worked through psychology, and hence an obstacle;
  2. a subjective counter-transference rooted in a shared experience or background between analyst and analysand, and hence a bridge for further empathy and understanding; and
  3. an objective counter-transference appropriately experienced by any sufficiently analysed, and hence qualified, analyst in any given situation.

        
        Winnicott understands the last of these responses as caused by the analysand’s psychology and hence a useful pointer to the correct analytic intervention. In a classic clinical vignette from “Hate in the Counter-transference,” Winnicott interprets what he deems an objective counter-transferential hate he feels toward his troublesome adolescent patient as sufficient justification for the disciplining action the boy deserves—namely, to be left outside, rain or shine, and not allowed back in till after he’d calmed down. No, Winnicott does not suffer from a Jekyll and Hyde complex. What we have here is merely the other side, the paternal side of discipline and truth, of the same parental coin.

        If the trope of analyst-as-mother is grounded in a simplistic two-person psychology, the paternal trope harks back to and ultimately is hardly anything more than a re-framing of the atomistic view from which Winnicott had supposedly separated himself. There is barely any structural difference between the model of the analyst as a blank screen onto which pathology gets projected and that of the analyst as an empty vessel into which pathology gets projected.

        The hate Winnicott experiences in the vignette is supposedly his patient’s; it is engendered by the very things the latter does in his “crude” way of loving (“Hate …” 203) and its enactment by the analyst is justified on the grounds that the patient can appreciate only what he is capable of feeling (195).

        As well, Winnicott substitutes the interpretation and resolution of the transference with that of the analysand’s hate, via the analyst’s, as the culmination of analytic work prior to which the “patient is kept to some extent in the position of infant—one who cannot understand what he owes to his mother [or to his analyst]” (202). While verbal communication is substituted with affective enactment as the preferred mode of analytic work, it is still the analysand’s psychology that is the principal agency here.

        What guides Winnicott in identifying his hate as objective rather than a by-product of a so-called un-worked through psychological hurdle for instance is a standard associated with the notion of a “mature healthy adult.” If, at any given moment, the analyst’s affective experience is equivalent to that of what would be expected from said adult, if, in other words, it is “justified,” then that experience is deemed objective and the analyst is, in a manner of speaking, off the hook.

        The masculinist aetiology and cultural baggage of this notion of a “mature healthy adult” has not been entirely overlooked, in some analytic circles at least. Ridding that notion of its male specificity and speaking instead of the mature but genderless healthy adult does not really help matters all that much. In either case, the notion remains self-serving since that adult could only be defined as he, or she, who has undergone good parenting at the hands of a parent and/or an analyst as parent.

        Structurally, the bottom line is that the notion of a mature healthy adult is used to legitimize and justify a process of which it is also the product. Instead of recognising the circularity of the argument, it is the recipient and provider of good parenting who emerges into the mind of the analyst as the standard of health and of sound clinical practice.

        If the fetishist disavows the reality of the vagina for fear of loosing the penis, the analyst disavows the vicious circularity of the Winnicottian approach for fear of loosing his or her only pole of health.

Clinically, a post-Winnicottian generation of psychoanalysts has taken up the motherly banner and, unknowingly, the double bind attendant to its implicit attitude of “no one is going to tell you how to do it but you’d better do it right; otherwise…” (see Mothers and Psychoanalysts ).

At its extreme, this double bind is now sadly and unwittingly transformed into a theoretical justification and a privileging of the clinical picture of the analyst as melancholic.
Note for instance said analyst’s

  1. inability to relinquish the ideal, and hence dead, object (the unmediated and gratifying mother);
  2. identification with the dead object (analyst as substitute source of gratification);
  3. sadism inverted into self-deprecation (readiness to assume responsibility for every disruption in the gratification as index of the analyst’s empathic failure);
  4. self-exposure (analysis is the analysis of the counter-transference);
  5. narcissism (cure is contingent on an internalisation of the supposedly healthy analyst).

And the list goes on.

        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.

        This post follows on the heels of Parental Fallacies Winnicott’s most often quoted maxim “there is no such thing as a baby” (“The Theory of The Parent-Infant Relationship,” 39n1) attempts to capture the field of object relations crucial for analytic work. Unfortunately, such a maxim remains stuck, and stubbornly so, in a dyadic position that does not, and indeed cannot, account for the third—to wit, the structure that defines the dyad, sets its parameters, identifies its goals, and prescribes its functions.

        The tie between mother and infant does not exist in a structural vacuum. This tie is anaclitic in nature; it serves to establish for the baby a link and an opposition between a physiological need and a libidinal drive. Both need and drive are not only directed toward an external object (the mother’s breast for instance) for their satisfaction, they are moreover defined by the viability and extent of that directionality.

        True enough, there is no such thing as a baby in the sense that its presence is always already contingent upon that of a mother or someone fulfilling a motherly function of sorts. Equally true is the fact that there is no such thing as a mother; this is so not only in her role as a dyadic compliment to the baby but also as someone whose presence is always already contingent upon that of a set of cultural, historical, legal, and communicative structures in matters of kinship and exchange. If a baby cannot exist without its mother, a mother cannot exist not only without a baby but, and much more crucially, without the structures that would allow her to identify, prioritise, and minister to that baby’s needs, that would allow her, in other words, to define herself as a mother in an extra-physiological sense.

        If one moves away from an atomistic theory of the human psyche and toward much more complex and overdetermined networks of relations, one must also move away from a simplistic two-person psychology that remains oblivious to that third which allows the two to be counted and made to communicate. By the “third,” I am not referring to what has become known as the “analytic third” in the literature, e.g. the institutional, legal, and professional factors that are ever present in the clinical setting; nor am I referring to that third elaborated by Ogden in his reading of Winnicott’s transitional space as an outcome of the encounter between mother and infant, analyst and analysand. By the “third,” I am referring rather to that grid of which these factors are only symptoms and/or effects, to that grid which precedes, underlies, and mediates any and all communication.

        In eliding this third, the psychoanalytic over-investment in the maternal trope substitutes one problematic essence (the structural model) with another (the mutually satisfying mother-infant relationship), one unfounded therapeutic goal (a strong, balanced, and resourceful ego in matters of conflict resolution) with another (a capacity to locate the good object and maintain an unmediated and gratifying relationship with it).

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Winnicott, D. W.. “The Theory of The Parent-Infant Relationship” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth, 1965.

        Be it the austere father with whom and against whom the oedipal drama is to be completed or the empathic mother remedying infancy and early childhood deficits of nurture, the parental fallacy continues to be one of the most persistent and striking elements in psychoanalytic practice; persistent in its quasi-universality and striking in the uncritical support it has managed to accrue.

        Indeed, and with the notable exception of some of those working in the Lacanian and relational fields, the endorsement of the parental model as a marker of sound clinical practice has substituted the dynamic unconscious and its primary process as the principle through which the analytic profession has come to identify and unify itself. In spite of their differences with the ego-psychological paradigm upon which that arbiter of professional standards was founded, revisionists and so-called dissidents have been able to hold on to their presence within the International Psychoanalytical Association not so much by an allegiance to first principles regarding the psyche but by their endorsement of a mechanism whereby the parental stance is grafted onto both the institutional and the clinical.

        Institutionally, this grafting has had the double effect of A) producing a hierarchy—the IPA—that is now fully grown into its status as hermaphroditic parent: father defending and policing the genealogical lines of access and exclusion, and mother providing for the offspring’s political and clinical sustenance; and B) the growth of societies and institutes outside the fold that, not coincidentally, have often operated with a number of tropes and models other than the parental.

        Clinically, the insistence on a parental schema, as well as its attendant hierarchies of knowledge and experience, has served to reinforce a divide between doctor and patient in matters of diagnosis, treatment, and health, a divide that, sadly, much of psychoanalysis continues to carry over from its nineteenth century roots.

        In a parallel mode, this insistence has helped consolidate an understanding of psychopathology as a stagnation or a regression in the individual’s temporal journey from primary, childish, or primitive defenses and coping strategies to more mature modes of organisation of self and/or relations to others. For many, this has become axiomatic. Under the banner of genital love, ego autonomy, the depressive position, or an integrated self, health is posited as a culminating synthesis and with it are articulated not only the aims but also the modes and stages of analytic inquiry.

        Whether it is framed in terms of conflict or deficit, or a combination thereof, the cause of the stagnation is located in a disruption in the individual’s earliest relations with his or her primary caregivers. In this context, analysis has to submit to the model of a process by which a repetition of the original development is pursued, though with a healthier resolution. As the stage upon which such a repetition unfolds, the transference is expected to absorb as many features of the pathology as it can bear and, in so doing, to allow for that pathology’s re-emergence and possible treatment in an environment that is both safe and robust!

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