THE BRITISH OBJECT RELATIONS SCHOOL: W. R. D. FAIRBAIRN AND D. W. WINNICOTT
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
For Freud, in short, man was the ambivalent animal; for Winnicott, he would be the dependent animal. . . . Prior to sexuality as the unacceptable, there was helplessness. Dependence was the first thing, before good and evil.
—Adam Phillips
Human beings, in Freud’s account, are born at odds with their environment. They are wired the way Freud and his contemporaries understood animals to be, oriented toward pursuing simple pleasures with ruthless abandon. But in Freud’s Hobbesian view of human society, the individual’s pursuit of egoistic satisfactions endangers other individuals, necessitating a control by the group on the hedonic aims of each individual. The project of childhood is socialization, the transformation of the infant, with his or her bestial impulses, into the adult, with his or her complex psychic apparatus and its intricate and elaborate system of checks and barriers channeling those impulses and aims into socially acceptable forms of civilized living.
All the important contemporary psychoanalytic schools view the human infant as less alien, more suited and adapted to the world into which he or she is born, than Freud did. As we have seen in chapter 2, Heinz Hartmann’s concept of adaptation provided the central conceptual vehicle for the transition from Freud to contemporary Freudian ego psychology. It was Melanie Klein who provided the crucial bridge between Freud and modern British object relations theories.
In redefining the nature of “drive” to include built-in human objects, Klein fundamentally altered the basic premises and metaphors underlying psychoanalytic theorizing. Freud envisioned a developmental passage from animal to person. Klein portrayed a distinctly human infant from the start, an infant who does not learn about the breast through “accidental” association, but who instinctively knows about the breast because she is born with that knowledge. Just as the infant’s mouth is anatomically shaped to fit the mother’s nipple, the infant’s instinctual impulses are shaped to fit the distinctively human world into which she is born.
Yet Klein’s baby is not a very happy baby. This baby is born with the capacity to organize discomfort and pain into an image of a persecutory, “bad” Other, and to organize comfort and pleasure and pain into an image of a rescuing, “good” Other. Because early experiences collect around prewired objects, constitutional patterns of danger and refuge, that infancy is inevitably fragmented and terrifying. For Klein, the project of childhood is not socialization, but amelioration of the frightening, nightmarish conditions of the infant’s experience of being in the world which derive from the intensity of the infant’s needs and the overwhelming force of constitutional aggression. We are born with psychotic anxieties and, under favorable conditions, sanity becomes a developmental achievement. Although pre-wired to draw her into the human environment, the infant’s instincts, in Klein’s account, generate inevitable and considerable psychic pain, which, under favorable circumstances, can be contained, organized and assuaged by good parenting.
In the early 1940s, after decades of acrimonious debate, the British Psychoanalytic Society split into three groups: those who fully accepted Melanie Klein’s innovations in theory and technique; those who remained loyal to more traditional Freudian concepts and practice (headed by Anna Freud and extended into Freudian ego psychology); and an “independent” or middle group, who developed non-Kleinian versions of what came to be known as object relations theories. The major figures in this middle group, W. R. D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, Michael Balint, John Bowlby, and Harry Guntrip, all built on Klein’s vision of an infant wired for human interaction. Yet they also all broke with Klein’s premise of constitutional aggression deriving from the death instinct, proposing instead an infant wired for harmonious interaction and nontraumatic development but thwarted by inadequate parenting.
In recalling his early days in the British Psychoanalytic Society, when the Kleinian belief in the aggressive, destructive baby predominated, John Bowlby cited as a milestone in the emergence of his own independent line of thought the moment when he rose defiantly to assert, in the middle of one such discussion, “But there is such a thing as a bad mother.” That succinct statement might serve as banner heralding in the development of post-Kleinian British object relations theories.1
W. R. D. FAIRBAIRN
Freud’s clinical observations charted the vicissitudes of human misery, the ways people systematically make themselves unhappy over and over again: the symptom neurosis, in which compulsive, bizarre behavior intrudes into experience; the character neurosis, in which maladaptive, self-defeating patterns of behavior compromise interactions with others; the fate neurosis, in which the same self-destructive destiny is orchestrated repeatedly; depression, in which emotional pain is perpetually regenerated. Yet Freud’s broad motivational theory, anchored in his concepts of instinctual drive and the pleasure principle, is a hedonic theory: People seek pleasure and avoid pain. The motivational framework of drive theory is very difficult to reconcile with Freud’s clinical observations of the repetition compulsion, the systematic regeneration of distress: painful symptoms, painful patterns of behavior, painful fates, painful affective states. If people are meant to seek pleasure and avoid pain, why are most of us so extraordinarily competent at keeping ourselves unhappy?
According to the pleasure principle, libido is malleable, employing a variety of interchangeable objects in its pursuit of pleasure; it ought to be able to discard painful desires and frustrating objects. Yet, Freud noted in 1905, the libido also has a property he termed adhesiveness, which seems to operate at odds with the pleasure principle. Libido gets painfully stuck to old, inaccessible objects, frustrated longings, thwarted desires. The Oedipus complex, the heart of Freud’s clinical theory, is the prime example of this. Freud returned to this knotty problem again and again, in his efforts to explain nightmares (since he understood dreams as wish fulfillments), sexual masochism (since he understood sexuality as the pursuit of pleasure, not pain), traumatic neurosis (in which terrifying experiences are impossible to leave behind).2
The Object-Seeking Libido
Fairbairn’s primary contribution to the history of psychoanalytic ideas is a different solution to the problem of the repetition compulsion, a different explanation for the adhesiveness of the libido. William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn (1899–1964) was trained in the British Psychoanalytic Society in the 1930s, when Klein’s emendations of Freudian theory were predominant. But Fairbairn returned to his home in Edinburgh and spent the rest of his life there, in virtual isolation from the battles in London between the Kleinians and the (Anna) Freudians. This life on the periphery seemed conducive to Fairbairn’s developing a radical critique of the basic underpinnings of Freudian theory, in a series of papers beginning in the 1940s.
Fairbairn questioned Freud’s premise that the fundamental motivation in life is pleasure and proposed a different starting point: Libido is not pleasure-seeking, but object-seeking. The fundamental motivational push in human experience is not gratification and tension reduction, using others as a means toward that end, but connections with others as an end in itself.
Freud’s infant operates as an individual organism; others become important only through their function in satisfying the baby’s needs. Fairbairn, in contrast, envisioned an infant wired for interaction with a human environment. The premise that libido is object-seeking provides, Fairbairn felt, a much more economical and persuasive framework for explaining Freud’s observations of the ubiquity of the repetition compulsion. The libido is adhesive because adhesiveness, rather than plasticity, is its very nature. The child bonds to the parents through whatever forms of contact the parents provide, and those forms become lifelong patterns of attachment and connection to others.
Where is pleasure in Fairbairn’s system? Pleasure is one form, perhaps the most wonderful form, of connection with others. If the parents engage in pleasurable exchanges with the child, the child becomes pleasure-seeking, not as an end in itself, but as a learned form of connection and interaction with others.
What if the parents provide mostly painful experiences? Does the child, as Freud’s pleasure principle would suggest, avoid the parent and seek other, more pleasure-providing objects? No.
One formative clinical experience for Fairbairn was his work with abused children. He was struck by the intensity of their attachment and loyalty to abusive parents; the lack of pleasure and gratification did not at all weaken the bonds. Rather, these children came to seek pain as a form of connection, the preferred form of connection, to others. Children, and later adults, seek from others the kinds of contact they experienced early on in their development. Just as ducklings become imprinted onto and follow around whatever caretaking object shows up at the right time (Lorenz, 1966), so, in Fairbairn’s view, do children become powerfully attached to and build their subsequent emotional lives around the kinds of interactions they had with their early caregivers.
Consider the centrality of “chemistry” in human romance and relationships in general. Others are not universally desirable according to their pleasure-giving potential. Others are desirable with respect to their resonance with attachments to old objects, avenues and tones of interaction laid down in early childhood as the basic paradigms of love.
Sam sought analysis complaining of a history of unhappy entanglements with very depressed women. He felt great confusion about how it was that he always managed to end up in such relationships. He came from a family in which the parents both felt resigned and crushed by life. Over the course of the analysis, Sam began to realize how much depression had served as a family ideology: Life is miserable; therefore, anyone with any moral fiber or intellectual integrity is miserable; the best we can hope for is to connect with each other through our unhappiness; anyone who is happy is shallow and morally suspect. Sam came to see that he believed any deeply meaningful connection with someone else could only be achieved through pain. Crying with someone was the deepest form of intimacy; laughing with someone was shallow and distancing. Being a good person necessitated bringing oneself down to the level of the other’s unhappiness. To be happy in the presence of another’s sadness was callous and cruel. It became more and more apparent that, despite his desperate wish for more pleasurable relationships with happier people, Sam selectively and systematically shaped all his important relationships around depressive ties to miserable others. For Fairbairn, libido is object-seeking, and the objects that are found early on become the prototypes for all later experience of connection with others.
The World of Internal Object Relations
Fairbairn built his own object relations theory out of conceptual materials supplied by Melanie Klein, particularly her notions of internal objects and internalized object relations. Yet his use of these terms and his vision of mind were very different from hers. For Klein, internal objects were fantasied presences that were an accompaniment to all experience. In the primitive thinking of the child and the always primitive unconscious thought of the adult, projective and introjective fantasies based on infantile experiences of nursing, defecating, and so on perpetually generated fantasies of good and bad internal objects, loving and hating, nurturing and destroying. Internal objects for Klein were a natural and inevitable feature of mental life; internalized object relations were the primary forms of thought and experience.
For Fairbairn, healthy parenting resulted in a child with an outward orientation, directed toward real people, who would provide real contact and exchange. Internal objects of the kind Klein described were understood by Fairbairn to result from inadequate parenting. If the child’s dependency needs are not met, if the affirmative interactions sought by the child are not provided, a pathological turning away from external reality, from actual exchange with others, takes place and fantasied, private presences (internal objects) are established, to whom one maintains a fantasied connection (internal object relations). For Fairbairn, internal objects are not (as for Klein) essential and inevitable accompaniments of all experience, but rather compensatory substitutes for the real thing, actual people in the interpersonal world.
Fairbairn’s account of the processes through which internal object relations develop was sketchy and incomplete, but some of his concepts have rich clinical applications. He envisioned the child with largely unavailable parents as differentiating between the responsive aspects of the parents (the good object) and the unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object). Because the child, in his object-seeking, cannot reach the unresponsive aspects of the parents in actuality, he internalizes them and fantasizes those features of the parents as now being inside of him, part of him.
This phenomenon can be seen at work in the case of Charles, a middle-aged man seeking analysis for episodic depressions and withdrawals. His father was caring but hard, remote, and extremely demanding. His mother was a very competent and available, happy-go-lucky homemaker, a committed optimist, always bright and cheery—her nickname was Sunny. Charles discovered in analysis that although he felt his mother was physically accessible, he never felt he could connect with her emotionally, that he was denied access to what she was really feeling about anything. He sensed an unexplained sadness about her which she never spoke of. He began to remember times when he would hear her crying behind her locked bedroom door; she would soon emerge, her sunny smile restored. He also recalled times when he would wake during the night at the sound of his father softly playing plaintive ballads on his harmonica in the dark of the living room. Charles would creep downstairs and, unobserved, listen quietly in the dark, secretly sharing these rare moments, rich in feeling, with his father.
Charles’s personality was shaped along lines similar to those of his parents; he was very active, responsible, and optimistic. Through the analysis, he began to understand his episodic depressions, atypical periods of total futility and despair, as precious links to the emotional centers of his parents’ lives that he did not have access to through actual, ongoing interactions with them. Surprisingly, he felt most connected to them, at one with them, when he was depressed. When Charles felt genuinely happy and successful, he felt cut off from them. A recurrent dream image emerged during the analysis: a jellyfish man, collapsed, sad, helpless and spineless. This image seemed to capture Charles’s depressive tie to his parents, a sadness with no bones, no structure, because the mournful connections to their emotionality were split off and encapsulated, not spoken about, not developed. In his depressions were preserved, like fragile icons from an archaic past, unintegrated fragments of loving ties.
Repression
Fairbairn’s understanding of repression was quite different in some fundamental respects from Freud’s. In Freud’s early theorizing, the center of the repressed was an actual experience, the memory of which, because of its traumatizing impact, could not be allowed into consciousness. As Freud shifted from the theory of infantile seduction to the theory of infantile sexuality, he began to conceive of the center of the repressed as forbidden impulses, too dangerous to be allowed access to consciousness. Memories may very well be repressed as well, but they were now understood to be repressed not because of their traumatic nature in itself, but because they are associated with conflictual, forbidden impulses.
Fairbairn saw the center of the repressed as neither memories nor impulses but relationships, ties to features of the parents that cannot be integrated into other relational configurations. Memories and impulses may also be repressed, but not primarily because they are traumatic or forbidden in their own right; rather, they are representative of, and threaten to expose, dangerous object ties.
For Freud, the repressed was composed of impulses, but the repressor was composed essentially of an internal relationship, the alliance between the ego and the superego. The ego, concerned with reality and safety, and the superego, concerned with morality and punishment, combined to block forbidden impulses from access to consciousness. For Fairbairn, both the repressed and the repressor were internal relationships. The repressed was part of the self tied to inaccessible, often dangerous features of the parents; the repressor was a part of the self tied to more accessible, less dangerous features of the parents.
Zachary, a young man seeking analysis because of considerable unhappiness in his romantic relationships, illustrates Fairbairn’s view of conflict as taking place between conscious and unconscious relationships rather than discrete impulses and defenses. His parents were married for only a few years. His mother was the favorite daughter of a very wealthy businessman; his father was ambitious and charming, from a poor background, and had courted and won the mother despite her family’s disapproval of him. When Zachary was three years old, his mother discovered what seemed to be clear evidence of her husband’s multiple infidelities. She operated in conjunction with her father and his lawyers to banish her husband from the family home and access to the family finances. He quickly became an exiled, dark character, whom Zachary had only limited access to. His mother remarried, in short order, someone who was from her own social class and known for his integrity and virtue.
Zachary had extremely idealistic notions of love and marriage, which no woman ever seemed to be able to live up to or fulfill. He was serially monogamous, but tormented by fears that he would never be able to commit himself to one woman. One key dimension of his experience in analysis was a gradual acquaintance with a dreaded aspect of himself modeled on his identification with his father. He began to realize that he both feared and longed to be like him, sexual, promiscuous, irresponsible, a version of himself he had kept carefully hidden, both from others and from himself. Memories of good times with and warmth toward his father were uncovered; various sexual impulses and fantasies were revealed. But the real danger, consistent with Fairbairn’s understanding of repression, was in the connection of all of this material to his libidinal attachment to his father. Given the vicissitudes of his early history, he could never allow himself to become aware of how internally bound to him he was; even now, such a realization seemed dangerous and threatening to his conscious sense of who he was (shaped in relation to his mother and stepfather) and what made it possible for him to be liked and cared for by other people.
The Splitting of the Ego
A child with depressed parents, detached parents, or narcissistically absorbed parents might begin to experience depression, detachment, narcissistic self-absorption in herself, through which she gains a sense of connection to the inaccessible sectors of the parents personalities. It is not at all uncommon for patients in the process of overcoming their own most painful affective states to feel they are losing touch with the parents as internal presences. As they begin to feel happier, they also feel somehow more alone, until they can trust in their growing capacity to make new, less painful connections with others.
Because all of us have had less than ideal parenting, Fairbairn presumes a universal splitting of the ego. The child, in Fairbairn’s system, becomes like the unresponsive features of the parents: depressed, isolated, masochistic, bullying, and so on. It is through the absorption of these pathological character traits that he feels connected to the parent, who is unavailable in other ways. This internalization of the parents also necessarily creates a split in the ego: part of the self remains directed toward the real parents in the external world, seeking actual responses from them; part of the self is redirected toward the illusory parents as internal objects to which it is bound.
Once the experiences with the parents have been split and internalized, a further split takes place, Fairbairn felt, between the alluring, promising features of the parents (the exciting object) and the frustrating, disappointing features (the rejecting object). For Charles, for example, his parents’ hidden affectivity had two dimensions: their sadness and emotionality, which he longed to reach and share with them, and their distance, the closed doors (with his mother), the darkness (with his father). In Fairbairn’s system, the longed-for emotionality is shaped into the exciting object, and the inevitable distance is shaped into the “rejecting object.”
The ego becomes correspondingly further split according to the split in internal objects. Part of the ego is bound to the exciting object, the part of the self that experiences perpetual longing and hope. Fairbairn terms this sector of the self the libidinal ego. Part of the ego is identified with the rejecting object, the part of the self that is angry and hateful, despising vulnerability and need. Fairbairn terms this sector of the self the anti-libidinal ego. The hostility of the anti-libidinal ego is directed toward the libidinal ego and the exciting object, both of which, from the perspective of the anti-libidinal ego, are misguided and dangerous.
Jane, an extremely isolated and tormented young woman suffering from severe anxiety, depression, and bulimia, was discussed briefly in chapter 4. She reported during a session subsequent to one in which the analyst had said some things that seemed very helpful to her that she had felt pleased but then, almost immediately on leaving the earlier session, very frightened. On her way home she had bought a huge bag of cookies, which she devoured and then made herself throw up. This purging emptied her out and calmed her down; it was as if the analyst’s interpretations were buried under and then evacuated with the sugary mess.
The inquiry into this and similar experiences revealed an internal antagonism and conflict between two very different ways of experiencing her relationship with the analyst. When she felt the analyst really was able to offer her something, which didn’t happen until many months into their work together, she felt a great upsurge of hope and longing. This state of mind quickly began to seem extremely dangerous to her. She began to feel that she had been duped by the analyst as seducer. How could she have been so gullible to believe the analyst would really be able to help her? Hadn’t she learned over and over throughout her life that hopes are always crushed, longings always painfully disappointed? She began to hate both the analyst with his promise of help and the part of herself that was susceptible to such promises. The cookies were the means through which she was able to bury, smother, and void the connection between her hopeful, gullible self and the alluring but ultimately disappointing analyst.
As this internal drama became articulated and developed, she recognized the hateful, embittered part of herself, the avenger with the Oreos, as a familiar one—the warden, she called it. It was as if she lived in a prison, cut off from human contact. The warden knew she was much safer in the prison. She would sometimes strain against the bars, wishing for more freedom in the world of other people, more contact, but ultimately she felt the warden knew best, knew how dangerous and treacherous the world of other people really is.
To translate these experiences into Fairbairn’s terminology: The prison represents Jane’s internal object world, in which she remains trapped but safe. The prisoner represents her libidinal ego, longing for greater freedom and contact (in these sessions embodied in the analyst as exciting object); the warden represents her anti-libidinal ego, identified with and hardened by chronic disappointment with and rejection by her parents.
Because of his penchant for schematization and new terminology, Fairbairn’s concepts of fragmented egos and internal objects are easy to misunderstand. He was not speaking of little homunculi “inside” the mind. Nor was he speaking simply of fantasies or images (what the ego psychologists term representations). Although most of us experience ourselves as a single, continuous self, Fairbairn envisioned people as actually structured into multiple, subtly discontinuous self-organizations, different versions of ourselves with particular characteristics and points of view.
Each of us shapes his relationships according to the patterns internalized from his earliest significant relationships. The modes of connection with early objects become the preferred modes of connection with new objects. Another way to describe the repetitiveness of patterns in human relations is to say that each of us projects his internal object relationships onto new interpersonal situations. New love objects are chosen for their similarity to bad (unsatisfying) objects in the past; new partners are interacted with in a way that provokes old, expected behaviors; new experiences are interpreted as if they fulfilled old expectations. It is because of this cyclical projection of old patterns and the reinternalization of self-fulfilling prophecies that character and disturbances in interpersonal relations are so difficult to change.
Fairbairn’s Analytic Situation
In Fairbairn’s understanding of the analytic situation, the patient, although searching hopefully for something new, inevitably experiences the analyst (in the transference) as an old, bad object. The basic assumptions and prototypes of human connection established in the past and preserved in internal object relations shape the experience with the analyst. If the analyst isn’t experienced through old patterns, the analyst isn’t important, and the analysis isn’t deeply engaged. Yet if the analyst is experienced solely in terms of old, unsatisfying relationships, how can anything new happen?
For Freud, it was insight that set the analysand free. She comes to understand that the pleasure she unconsciously pursues in her infantile strivings is not possible. The reality principle gains dominance over the pleasure principle, and the doomed longings of early childhood are renounced.
For Fairbairn, it is not unconscious pleasure-seeking that imprisons the analysand in neurosis; the neurosis embodies the only forms of relation with others the analysand believes in. She feels connected to others, both in the real world and to the presences in her inner world, only through painful states of mind and self-defeating patterns of behavior. She is convinced that renouncing these painful states and old patterns would lead to total isolation, abandonment, annihilation. Insight is not enough. Insight alone doesn’t allow the analysand to realize the impossibility of her neurotic strivings; she can’t imagine being herself without them. According to Fairbairn, no one can give up powerful, addictive ties to old objects unless she believes that new objects are possible, that there is another way to relate to others in which she will feel seen and touched. For the analysand to renounce the old, transferential forms of connection to the analyst, she must begin to believe in new, less constrained patterns of relatedness.
Fairbairn didn’t spell out the processes through which the patient begins to experience the analyst as a different sort of object. Some authors (e.g., Racker) argue that the very act of providing interpretations makes the analyst a different sort of object. Others (e.g., Winnicott) argue that it is not the interpretations but the analytic “frame,” the reliable structure within which the analysis takes place, that makes the analyst a new object. Whatever the mechanism, Fairbairn located analytic change not in the dawning of insight, but in a changed capacity for relatedness, an ability to connect with the analyst in new ways.
A middle-aged woman whose family was structured around patterns of male dominance and female submission tended to use her relationships in general and her analytic sessions in particular as opportunities for ritual humiliation. Paula would recount her failings, her incompetencies, her hopelessness in a manner which, many years ago, would provoke her father to take her over, crushing and protecting her in the same gesture. She was certain the analyst regarded her with enormous contempt, and she felt ashamed of her deep inadequacies, which she believed it was necessary to expose and document.
Several years into the work, Paula spoke of the kind of experience Fairbairn regarded as central to analytic change. She had been preparing her financial records for her accountant and discovered that she had made more money the previous year than she had ever imagined possible. She reported a flickering good feeling followed by a tremendous surge of depression and hopelessness about the increased taxes she would now have to pay. The analyst encouraged her to describe her experience of the two states. When she felt more powerful in her earning capacity, she quickly experienced a sense of being “all alone out there,” somehow isolated, unattached, undesirable. She couldn’t imagine the analyst feeling anything warm or deep toward her as competent and productive and imagined her treatment ending abruptly. As she plummeted into her familiar depressed and abashed state, Paula felt somehow more connected, more protected. The analyst would feel sorry for her and keep her around. Ironically, the more powerful she was, the more endangered she felt. It is only in living through such moments in the analytic relationship, moments that stand outside old patterns, containing states of mind that are “out of character,” that the patient gradually begins to believe in and become able to commit herself to new modes of relatedness.
Toward the end of her analysis, Paula described a sense of herself as being like a jungle cat in a cage whose door stood open. She could see how her old forms of organizing her experiences and relationships constrained her and could sense the possibility of stepping outside them into a greater freedom. Yet her cage provided her with a safety, even if illusory, that was hard to give up. She paced back and forth, back and forth, feeling powerful but self-restrained. She could not leave until she felt that her exit would not result in a precipitous plunge; until she could believe that there was firm footing (other modes of relating) beyond the door of the cage and not an abyss.
D. W. WINNICOTT
Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971) was a pediatrician before he became a psychoanalyst and he continued his involvement with pediatrics throughout his analytic career. Having spent a great deal of time watching babies and their mothers, he developed strikingly innovative and enormously provocative ideas about both the sort of mothering that facilitates healthy development and the sort that leads development astray.
Like Fairbairn’s, Winnicott’s early contributions were written in a distinctly Kleinian mode. Winnicott had impeccable credentials as a Kleinian: his first analyst was James Strachey (the translator of the standard English edition of Freud’s writings), who had been instrumental in bringing Klein to England; his second analyst was Joan Riviere, one of Klein’s closest collaborators. And he was supervised by Klein herself. But in the end, his spirit was too independent, his vision of psychodynamics and development too original, to be contained within the orthodoxy Klein demanded from her disciples. (See Grosskurth, 1986, for a fascinating account of the relationship between Winnicott and Klein.)
“A baby can be fed without love,” he wrote, “but lovelessness as impersonal management cannot succeed in producing a new autonomous human child” (1971, p. 127). This typical statement from Winnicott’s late work contains many of his major concerns and is emblematic of the fresh perspective he brought to psychoanalytic thinking about the relationship between baby and mother and, in parallel fashion, about the relationship between patient and analyst.
False Self Disorder
Winnicott’s clinical focus was not on psychopathology as traditionally defined, in terms of either symptoms (e.g., obsessional neurosis) or character deformation manifested in behavior (e.g., schizoid withdrawal). Winnicott was concerned with the quality of subjective experience: the sense of inner reality, the infusion of life with a feeling of personal meaning, the image of oneself as a distinct and creative center of one’s own experience. The kind of patient he found most intriguing was not the person rent by intense conflict, or tormented by disturbing, puzzling symptoms, or burdened by depression or guilt, but the person who acted and functioned like a person but who didn’t feel to himself like a person. False self disorder was the term Winnicott began to use to characterize this form of psychopathology in which subjectivity itself, the quality of personhood, is somehow disordered.
How is such psychopathology generated? Winnicott argued that fundamental disorders in selfhood originate prior to the oedipal phase (to which Freud had traced neurosis), even prior to later infancy (to which Melanie Klein had traced depressive disorders). Winnicott’s most profound and most productive insight was the connection he began to draw between false self disorders in adult patients and the subtle variations he observed in mother–infant interactions from the very beginning of life. What seemed most telling was not gross abusiveness or severe deprivation, but something in the quality of the mother’s responsiveness to the baby, her “management” of the baby’s needs. It was not just feeding that was crucial, but love, not need gratification, but the mother’s responsiveness to the “personal” features of the infant’s experience. The bridge Winnicott constructed between the quality and nuances of adult subjectivity and the subtleties of mother–infant interactions provided a powerful new perspective for viewing both the development of the self and the analytic process.
Winnicott portrayed the newborn as drifting in a stream of unintegrated (not disintegrated) moments; discrete wishes and needs emerge spontaneously and, as they are met, melt back into the drift, which he termed “going-on-being.” Winnicott’s choice of unintegration to characterize the child’s earliest state of mind is very important, suggesting, in contrast to Klein, an experience that is comfortably disconnected without being fragmented, diffuse without being terrifying. Winnicott saw the quality of the infant’s experience of the earliest months of life as crucial for the emergence of personhood. It was the environment that the mother provided (not the child’s conflictual instinctual pressures) that determined the outcome. False self disorders, in Winnicott’s perspective, were “environmental deficiency diseases.”
Winnicott characterized the state of mind that enables the “good-enough mother” to provide the kind of environment the infant requires as “primary maternal preoccupation.” The mother is prepared in the last trimester of pregnancy for this deeply biological, evolutionarily honed function by her natural absorption with the baby, whose growth inside her is crowding her own internal organs, compromising her own mobility, her own digestive and eliminative processes, her very capacity to breathe. She becomes increasingly withdrawn from her own subjectivity, from her own interests in the world, and more and more focused on the baby’s movements, on the baby’s vitality. The final stages of pregnancy become symbolically emblematic of, and a literal preparation for, the mother’s supplying in the earliest months of life an environment that nurtures the growth of the infant’s self. In providing the environment for the infant, the mother finds her own subjectivity, her own personal interests, her own rhythms and concerns fading into the background; she adapts her movements, her activities, her very existence to the baby’s wishes and needs.
The biologically mandated environment created by the mother makes possible for the infant an immersion in the kind of experience Winnicott regarded as crucial for the quickening of subjectivity, the emergence of a distinctly “human” person with a sense of life as real and meaningful. As the infant’s needs and wishes emerge from the unintegrated drift of consciousness, the good-enough mother intuits the child’s desire relatively quickly and shapes the world around the child so as to fulfill that desire. The physical responsiveness of the nursing mother’s body (the “letting down” of breast milk) is the prototype for a more general responsiveness to the baby’s “spontaneous gestures,” the mother’s own deeply felt need to offer herself as a vehicle for the baby’s wants and expressions.
The baby’s experience in this extraordinary time is one in which he is the all-powerful center of all being—subjective omnipotence is the term Winnicott used. His wish makes things happen. If he is hungry and desires the breast, it appears; he makes it appear; he creates the breast. If he is cold and starting to feel uncomfortable, it becomes warmer. He controls the temperature of the world around him; he creates his surroundings. The mother “brings the world” to the infant without delay, without skipping a beat, and, Winnicott suggested, her responsiveness is what gives the infant that moment of illusion, the belief that his own wish creates the object of his desire.
It is crucial that the mother be there when needed, but it is equally crucial that she recede when she is not needed. She creates what Winnicott termed a holding environment, a physical and psychical space within which the infant is protected without knowing he is protected, so that very obliviousness can set the stage for the next spontaneously arising experience.
It will probably have occurred to the reader that nobody in her right mind would be willing or able to provide such an experience for another person, no matter how adorable, for very long. But this is just the point. In Winnicott’s view, the mother is not in her right mind. The state of primary maternal preoccupation is a constructive kind of temporary madness that enables the mother to suspend her own subjectivity to become the medium for the development of the subjectivity of the infant. Under optimal circumstances, the mother gradually emerges from this state of vicarious selfhood. She becomes increasingly interested in her own comforts, her own concerns, her own sense of personhood, and therefore her response to her baby’s wishes and gestures begins to be more sluggish. She begins to miss a beat, then two beats, then three.
This slow, incremental failure of the mother to “bring the world” to the baby has a powerful, somewhat painful, but constructive impact on his experience. He slowly begins to realize, in the gradually widening gap between desire and satisfaction, that contrary to his plausible and compelling earlier beliefs, his desires are not omnipotent. It was not his wants and gestures that themselves created their own satisfaction, but his mother’s responsive facilitation. This slowly dawning realization has enormous implications, among which is that the infant who, to the outside observer, has of course been quite helpless and dependent all along, begins to feel dependent for the first time. There is a gradual awareness that the world consists not of one subjectivity, but of many; that satisfaction of one’s desires requires not merely their expression but negotiations with other persons, who have their own desires and agendas.
Transitional Experience
To the child’s experience of subjective omnipotence is eventually added an experience of objective reality. The latter does not replace the former, but rather exists alongside or in dialectical relation to it. Winnicott did not regard development as a linear sequence in which each stage replaces the preceding one, and this is crucial in his innovative vision of mental health. The person who lives completely in objective reality is a false self without a subjective center, completely oriented toward the expectations of others, toward external stimuli. Being a distinctly human person with a continually regenerating sense of self and personal meaning requires the preservation of the experience of subjective omnipotence as a deeply private, never fully revealed core of experience. The temporary experience of subjective omnipotence provided for the infant by the mother’s holding and facilitating remains as a precious legacy and resource. This crucial early experience enables the growing child to continue to experience his own spontaneously emerging desires and gestures as real, as important, as deeply meaningful, even though they must be integrated in adaptive negotiation with other persons.
Between the two forms of experience that Winnicott called subjective omnipotence and objective reality lies a third form: transitional experience. In subjective omnipotence, the child feels she has created the desired object, such as the breast, and believes she has total control over it. In experience organized according to objective reality, the child feels she has to find the desired object out in the world; she is acutely aware of the separateness and distinctness of the object and her lack of control over it. The “transitional object” is experienced as neither subjectively created and controlled nor as discovered and separate, but as somewhere in between. The status of the transitional object is, by definition, ambiguous and paradoxical. What is crucial in good-enough parenting with respect to transitional experience is that the parent does not challenge its ambiguity. The specialness of the teddy bear is accepted.
The term transitional object, like many psychoanalytic terms, has been taken up and expanded in popular usage. One of its most popular applications has been in reference to the transition between a symbiotic merger with and dependence on the mother and separation–individuation as envisioned by Freudian ego psychologists, particularly Mahler. The child’s transitional object, such as the teddy bear, represents the mother to the child and enables the child to maintain a fantasied tie to the mother as she gradually separates for increasingly longer periods of time.
But Winnicott had something else in mind: not the transition from dependence to independence, but the transition between two different modes of organizing experience, two different patterns of positioning the self in relation to others. What makes the teddy bear so important is not just that it stands for the mother, but that it constitutes a special extension of the child’s self, halfway between the mother that the child creates in subjective omnipotence and the mother that the child finds operating on her own behalf in the objective world. The transitional object, with its paradoxical ambiguity, cushions the fall from a world where the child’s desires omnipotently actualize their objects to one where desires require accommodation to and collaboration of others to be fulfilled.
Winnicott introduced the concepts of transitional object and transitional experience in reference to a particular developmental sequence; in his later writings, however, he greatly expanded them into a vision of mental health and creativity. Transitional experience became the protected realm within which the creative self could operate and play; it was the area of experience from which art and culture were generated. A person who lived essentially in subjective omnipotence, with no bridge to objective reality, was autistic and self-absorbed. A person who lived essentially in objective reality, with no roots in subjective omnipotence, was superficially adjusted, but lacking in passion and originality. It was precisely the ambiguity of the transitional realm that rooted experience in deep and spontaneous sources within the self and, at the same time, connected self-expression with a world of other subjectivities.
Object usage is another concept Winnicott introduced in his later papers, in exploring the place of aggression in the transition between subjective omnipotence and objective reality. In subjective omnipotence, the child uses the object “ruthlessly.” He creates it, exploits it thoroughly for his own pleasure, and destroys it in his total appropriation of it. From a perspective outside the child’s subjectivity, this experience requires a mother who surrenders herself to and can survive being used this way. Gradually, the child begins to become aware of the other who survives his destruction of her. It is the cyclical process of omnipotent creation, destruction, and survival that begins to establish for the child some sense of externality, a real other who exists in her own right, outside his omnipotent control.
If the mother has trouble surviving the baby’s usage of her, if she withdraws or collapses or retaliates, the baby must prematurely attend to externality at the price of a full experience of his own desire, which feels omnipotent and dangerous. The result is a child afraid to fully need and use his objects and, subsequently, an adult with neurotic inhibitions of desire. Adult love, in Winnicott’s vision, entails periodic mutual object usage, in which each partner can surrender to the rhythms and intensity of his or her own desire without having to worry about the survivability of the other. It is a firm and solid sense of the durability of the other that makes a full and intense connection with one’s own passions possible.
The Psychopathology of Not-Good-Enough Mothering
When the mother is unable to provide the kind of good-enough environment necessary for the consolidation of a healthy sense of self, Winnicott felt, the child’s psychological development essentially ceases. He remains stuck in psychological time, with the rest of his personality growing past and around a missing core. The kernel of genuine personhood is suspended, buffered by an adaptive compliance with the deficient environment, until a holding environment can be found that allows the emergence of a more spontaneous, authentic subjective experience.
When things go wrong, Winnicott believed, rather than feeling held, the child experiences impingement, which comes in several forms. If the child expresses spontaneous desire and the desire is not fulfilled, he feels ignored or misread and impingement occurs. If the child drifts into going-on-being and is not sustained in a supportive unintegration, he feels forced to focus on and deal with some demand in the outside world and impingement occurs. Rather than providing a protected psychic space within which the self can playfully expand and consolidate, the not-good-enough mother presents the child with a world he has to immediately come to terms with, to adapt to, and the premature concern with the external world cramps and impedes the development and consolidation of the child’s own subjectivity.
Peter, a mechanical engineer in his forties who specialized in repairing complex electronic machinery, sought psychoanalytic treatment because he realized that he felt a vague but painful sense of being removed from life. He held back from pursuing both activities and relationships with people. There was a “noise” level in his head that somehow distracted him from living, coming between him and the outside world. Sometimes the “noise” was in the background; sometimes it was more prominent. He had come to realize recently that it was always there.
A particular inhibition, inexplicable to Peter, precipitated his entering analysis. For a long time he had wanted to learn gliding, flying engineless planes, which had fascinated him since he was a small boy. He used to spend hours, transfixed, watching clouds and birds, buoyed up, moved by and moving through currents of air. There was something that drew him powerfully to gliding, but he had avoided starting lessons, telling himself he was too busy. He had recently gotten as far as the airfield, where he had an anxiety attack that he found totally perplexing and that led him to seek help.
As he spoke about gliding, Peter realized that it was as if he were seeking in the gliding a certain kind of experience, a suspension in air, that would hold him up, and through which he could gradually descend in a controlled and effortless way. He had always enjoyed swimming, partially because it provided similar sensations. Scuba diving, he explained, was very much like gliding. One was suspended, invisibly supported. He loved to rotate his body under the water in a fashion similar to the dips and rolls of a glider. The anxiety he felt in anticipating his first gliding lesson was like the strange dread he had felt at times in scuba diving, when he would reach the edge of a coral reef, at the point where the floor of the ocean drops off precipitously to great depths. Besides the visual shift, floating along over an ocean floor hundreds of feet below was, of course, really no different from floating along over a reef twenty or thirty feet below. But it felt very different to Peter. As the ocean floor disappeared from view, he would feel a sharp sense of dread; he no longer felt supported and buoyed, but helpless and endangered.
There was little anxiety in his anticipations of piloting the glider once he had learned to fly. All the anxiety was focused on the first lesson itself, when he would fly with an instructor behind him who would be in control. The problem wasn’t in the gliding itself, but in the reliance on the instructor. Peter pictured being towed by the plane that would pull the glider up into the sky and the moment at which the tow rope between the plane and the glider would be disconnected. He began to realize that was the moment he dreaded, when he would be released into the care of the instructor behind him, on whom he would have to depend for his very survival.
Over the course of his analysis, he came to understand that in scuba diving and gliding, he was searching for a kind of experience in this physical environment which he had missed in his human environment. He had never felt he could count on his parents to take care of him in a way that would let him become absorbed in his own thoughts and wishes. His parents were involved in chronic arguments, in which he became a mediator at a very young age. He became purely logical, using his considerable intelligence prematurely to stabilize an environment that always seemed explosive.
His parents were both deeply and profoundly depressed people, defeated by life. “Why bother?” was the family motto. Peter’s creative excitement and enthusiasm about things were greeted by responses like: “Don’t get your hopes up”; “Be realistic”; “Don’t get yourself all in a tizzy.” His intelligence began to develop in an uneven way. He had great difficulty with abstract concepts that were complex and ambiguous but became extremely adept at building and fixing machinery: “If I can see it, I can understand it”; “I am what I fix.” He began to understand that he used his considerable intelligence to “fix” a place for himself a world he experienced as shifting and undependable. Intellectual and emotional problems that were not immediately graspable and fixable, that required tolerating some ambiguity, some suspension in not-knowing, were very confusing and anxiety-provoking to him.
At one point, Peter recovered a memory that seemed strikingly emblematic of his childhood. His family had moved from one city to another two days before his fourth birthday. On the day of his birthday, his mother belatedly thought it would be a good idea to have a party, but of course they didn’t know anyone to invite. She sent his older brother out to round up some kids from the new neighborhood for the party. Peter was horrified, both then and now. “Why not cardboard kids?” he asked with the outrage he had felt unable to express at the time.
Peter’s adult life might be understood as a search for crucial, missed experiences. Spontaneous excitement was met with fear and cautiousness rather than responsive adaptation and actualization. He could never take his human environment for granted, in a way which would allow for the playful exploration of his own subjectivity, but was compelled to develop a premature, intellectual vigilance and control over his world. He longed to surrender the vigilance and control he had learned to maintain and to simply drift and float in his own experience; yet he was terrified of doing just that, particularly when it depended on the participation of another human being.
In Winnicott’s view, it is chronic maternal failure that causes this kind of radical split within the self between the genuine wellsprings of desire and meaning (the true self) and a compliant self (the false self), which is fashioned out of the premature, forced necessity for dealing with the external world. In an autobiographical fragment, Sullivan vividly captured the kind of splitting Winnicott had in mind: “There was such a difference between me and my mother’s son, that I often felt myself to be no more than a clothes horse upon which she hung her illusions.” To become “me,” with a consolidated sense of a self, experienced as real, generating one’s own personal meaning, requires a maternal environment that adapts itself to the child’s emerging subjectivity. The infant begins to have a sense of his “mother’s son,” a set of images and expectations he must come to terms with, only after “me” is firmly established, believed in, enjoyed. Having to deal with being “mother’s son” too early, at the expense of coming to know and express “me,” results in a jarring discontinuity at the center of experience.
Doris, a young woman in analysis for the first time, talked during the initial consultations in a nonstop, rapid, pressured fashion. Among her presenting problems were a clinging dependency on friends and a great difficulty in being alone. She lived by herself and would play the radio or television constantly to create a sense of the presence of others. In the analysis, she was very worried about having nothing to say—she was sure silences would lead to her expulsion from analysis—and prepared extensively ahead of time for each session. She seemed acutely attentive to the analyst’s reactions.
It was discovered that Doris’s dread of silences concerned a preoccupation with what she imagined the analyst’s experience during her silence would be: an intense boredom likely to be increasingly unpleasant and, eventually, unendurable. She began to realize that she pictured the analyst’s mind as a frightening place, and assumed that the analyst focused on his patients in order to keep his mind off his own internal horrors. Doris’s attention on to the analyst and his expectations and needs saved the analyst from his own demons, she felt, and if she allowed herself to become absorbed in her own experience, her own going-on-being, the analyst would become intolerably anxious.
Subsequent exploration revealed that Doris’s parents had demonstrated many indications of a precarious mental balance. Their often stunningly inappropriate, intrusive behavior in the present, which revealed a reluctance to allow their daughter her own life, suggested similar intrusiveness and impingement in the early years, when the delicate balance between internality and externality is established. Because of the parents’ inability to be comfortable with themselves, the daughter never had an environment in which she could become acquainted with and explore her own subjectivity. Doris had learned to compulsively generate false-self experience to meet the parents’ needs and to mediate the terrifying gaps in her own experience which she never discovered how to survive and enjoy.
Later in the analysis, Doris reported trying to achieve a state of “removing myself,” in preparation for a trip to visit her parents. She remembered spending hours staring into a mirror when she was around ten and eleven, forcing herself not to blink, trying to dispel, quite successfully, her sense of “I.” She reported a repetitive dream: “There was a baby, but there really wasn’t. I’m not sure whose baby it was. It was just a head. It was a wax thing. It was supposed to be a baby, but it was going to melt.”
In Winnicott’s view, the baby faced with an inadequate holding environment has no choice but to disconnect her mind (the baby’s head) from its sources in the body and more spontaneous experience, and to mold her experience around what is provided from the external world. The baby is no longer really a baby, in the sense of the beginnings of authentic personal subjectivity. The child shapes a false self that both deals with an external world that must be watched and negotiated and also shelters the seeds of more deeply genuine experience until a more suitable environment is found.
Winnicott’s Analytic Situation
The psychoanalytic situation, as Winnicott understood it, is perfectly designed for exploring and regenerating personal subjectivity. The analyst, like the good-enough mother, provides an environment in which her own subjectivity is on hold. The analyst, like the good-enough mother, tries to grasp the deeply personal dimensions of the patient’s experience, the patient’s spontaneously arising desires. The patient is offered refuge from the demands of the outside world; nothing is expected except to “be” in the analytic situation, to connect with and express what one is experiencing. No continuity or order is demanded; unintegration and discontinuity are expected and accepted. The analyst and the analytic situation provide a holding environment in which aborted self-development can be reanimated, safe enough for the true self to begin to emerge.
Winnicott introduced ways of thinking about the analytic situation that were very different from those of previous authors. For Freud, the patient’s difficulties stemmed from secrets, gaps in memory. The patient’s free associations provided the analyst with tools to uncover those secrets, to reconstruct those memories, and to reveal and modify the patient’s own internal resistances to knowing and remembering. Cure entailed an eventual renunciation of conflictual infantile longings thus revealed.
For Winnicott, the patient’s difficulties stemmed from an internal division that removed and split off the sources of her own personal experience. The problem was not in specific desires, conflicts, or memories, but in the way experience in general was generated. The regressive pull of the analytic situation facilitated the emergence not so much of old desires, but old “ego needs,” developmental requirements for the growth of the self. Winnicott saw the patient as powerfully self-restorative, shaping and molding the analytic situation to provide the environmental features missed in childhood. Content and interpretations, were nearly irrelevant in Winnicott’s account; what was crucial was experience of the self in relation to the other.
In his work with more disturbed patients, Winnicott made every effort to shape the treatment around their spontaneously arising needs. Even setting regular times for sessions creates an artificial, external structure to which the patient needs to adapt, like an infant being fed according to a schedule rather than on demand. So Winnicott would try to provide sessions on demand. He told of one young woman he would watch for from behind his curtains. Timing was crucial. As she approached his front door and raised her hand to knock, he would open the door, as if her wish for him in fact had created him.
[T]he infant comes to the breast when excited, and ready to hallucinate something fit to be attacked. At that moment the actual nipple appears and he is able to feel it was that nipple that he hallucinated. So his ideas are enriched by actual details of sight, feel, smell, and next time this material is used in the hallucination. In this way he starts to build up a capacity to conjure up what is actually available. The mother has to go on giving the infant this type of experience. (1958, pp. 152–153)
Similarly, the patient comes to the analytic situation looking for experiences necessary to revitalize the self. The analyst offers himself to be used freely in providing the patient with missed experiences. The analyst allows the patient to feel she has created him and, by not challenging that use of him, enables the patient to rediscover her own capacity to imagine and fantasize, to generate experience that feels deeply real, personal, and meaningful.
OTHER INDEPENDENT GROUP INNOVATORS
The other major innovative figures in the “independent” group of the British Psychoanalytic Society were Michael Balint, John Bowlby, and Harry Guntrip. The authors of this group were independent not only in relation to the Kleinians and (Anna) Freudians, but also from each other. They all drew heavily on the work of Melanie Klein, and they all shifted their emphasis from conflicts between drives and defenses to the establishment and maintenance of relations with others. However, they each did this in their own distinctive fashion.3
From Ferenczi to Balint
Michael Balint (1896–1970) was analyzed by Sandor Ferenczi and, in many respects, Balint’s contribution was an extension of Ferenczi’s. Ferenczi (1873–1933) had been one of the most innovative of Freud’s early disciples, both in theory and in clinical practice. In the last several years before his death, Ferenczi had become more and more preoccupied with the impact of early deprivation on personality development, placing a central emphasis on early, chronic trauma, including sexual experiences. This was a return to the perspective Freud had rejected in abandoning the theory of infantile seduction in 1897 in favor of his theory of instinctual drive and the centrality of fantasy.
Ferenczi was also an innovator with respect to clinical technique. Consistent with his theoretical emphasis on trauma and deprivation, he became more and more convinced of the importance of the analyst providing a measured love and affection, rather than abstinent nongratification of the patient’s needs and wishes. He also objected to what he felt was the hierarchical, authoritarian arrangement of the traditional analytic relationship between an analyst who dispenses interpretations and a patient who receives them. This led to brief, quickly abandoned experiments with “mutual analysis” between patient and analyst in which they took turns lying on the couch and free-associating.4
As the analyst of Balint, as well as of Melanie Klein and Clara Thompson, Ferenczi was a key figure in the transitions from Freud’s work to several of the most important currents of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Balint’s extension of Ferenczi’s innovations led him to the conviction that what patients, particularly more disturbed patients, are seeking in the analytic situation is not gratification of infantile sexual and aggressive wishes, but an unconditional love, a “primary object love,” they were deprived of in childhood. Unlike Fairbairn, Balint never rejected Freud’s drive theory; yet, like Fairbairn, Balint argued that object relations are not derivatives of drives but are present at the beginning of life. “This form of object relation [primary object love] is not linked to any of the erotogenic zones; it is not oral, oral-sucking, anal, genital, etc., love, but is something on its own” (1937, pp. 84–85).
In Balint’s view, the earliest relationship with the mother is a passive state experienced as a “harmonious, interpenetrating mix-up” of “primary substances” (1968, p. 66). It is out of this passive state that more active forms of relating and pleasure-seeking arise. A rupture in this early relationship creates what Balint terms “the basic fault,” a fragmentation and disjunction at the core of the self which, in some fundamental sense, the patient comes to the analytic situation longing to heal. Balint’s contribution provides innovative approaches for reframing often difficult clinical situations to highlight the patient’s effort, often only dimly understood, to recapture missed developmental opportunities through what he called “benign regression” and reown dissociated aspects of the self.
John Bowlby
Of all the major contributors to psychoanalytic thought over the past several decades, nobody has had more impact than John Bowlby (1907–1990) on the conceptualization of the relationship between psychoanalysis and other disciplines, including biology, anthropology, ethology, information processing, and research on children and families.
Bowlby’s approach to psychoanalysis, like Freud’s, was firmly rooted in Darwin, but Bowlby’s Darwinism was distinctly twentieth-century, as opposed to Freud’s nineteenth-century version. For Freud, the central and most startling message of the Darwinian revolution was humankind’s ascent from “lower species,” leading Freud to hypothesize a seething cauldron of underlying motives derived from what he and his contemporaries understood to be animal nature. For Bowlby, as for Hartmann (see chapter 2), the central message of the Darwinian revolution was the role of adaptation in shaping animal and human nature. For Freud, the instincts were unruly and asocial, wrestled into adaptation only through the long and arduous struggles of the ego. For Bowlby, the instincts were more usefully regarded as preadapted to the human environment, honed over millions of years by natural selection for purposes of survival.
The dimension of adaptation that Hartmann explored was cognitive and perceptual functions. The adaptive, instinctual motivation of central concern to Bowlby involved the child’s tie to the mother, which Bowlby termed attachment. He argued that the establishment of a deep and tenacious bond to the mother is an instinctual system that enhances the infant’s chances for survival. Greater proximity to the mother ensures better caretaking and protection from predators, and Bowlby delineated five component instinctive responses that lead to greater proximity, mediating attachment: sucking, smiling, clinging, crying, and following.
Within the traditional drive theory framework, the mother as a person becomes known and important to the child only because of her function as a need-gratifying object. It follows that early competent caretakers are interchangeable, and that early loss of the mother, when she is still a need-gratifying (rather than libidinal) object, produces no great psychic trauma and no mourning. But Bowlby argued that the child’s attachment to the mother is instinctual, not acquired, and primary, not derivative of the mother’s need-gratifying activities. He used an extensive survey of empirical studies of separation and loss in both animals and humans to substantiate his claim that early loss results in true mourning, pointing to the primacy of the child’s tie to the mother.
Bowlby’s concept of attachment, closely related to Fairbairn’s notion of libido as object-seeking, became the centerpiece of his broad reformulation of all the central features of personality development and psychopathology. Emotional security is a reflection of confidence in the availability of attachment figures, which is built up gradually through early childhood experiences, Bowlby believed. Different kinds of anxiety are all rooted in a basic anxiety concerning separation from the object of attachment; anger is, most fundamentally, a response to and protest against separation. At the root of all defenses, Bowlby suggested, is detachment, a deactivation of the fundamental and central need for attachment, around which emotional experience is organized.
Harry Guntrip
Harry Guntrip, an analysand of both Fairbairn and Winnicott, has played an important role in explicating, codifying, and integrating (in his own fashion) the contributions of all the authors of the British middle group. Guntrip went further than anyone else in characterizing psychoanalysis as a “replacement therapy,” in which the analyst operates “in loco parentis” to provide the missing interpersonal medium necessary for the growth and development of a healthy self. It is a nurturing analytic relationship, Guntrip suggested, highly personal and interpersonal, that becomes the vehicle for cure.
Fairbairn and Guntrip both regarded the schizoid phenomena of withdrawal and detachment as underlying all other forms of psychopathology. Fairbairn had suggested that schizoid withdrawal is only a withdrawal from real people in the external world, that schizoid people are powerfully involved with and devoted to fantasied presences of people as internal objects. Thus the libidinal ego (hope and longing) is very much involved with the exciting object; the anti-libidinal ego (hate and hopelessness) is very much identified with the rejecting object.
Guntrip suggested that in the face of severe deprivation, the libidinal ego itself becomes split. Part of the ego renounces object-seeking altogether, giving up both external and internal objects, withdrawing into a deep, hidden isolation. There is a great longing for a return to the womb and a new beginning in a more hospitable maternal environment. This part of the self, the regressed ego, manifests itself in a pervasive feeling of ego weakness and a profound sense of helplessness and hopelessness. In his effort to integrate the contributions of Fairbairn and Winnicott, Guntrip presented his concept of the regressed ego, frozen in isolation, as encompassing both the self in flight from frustrating objects (a split-off portion of Fairbairn’s libidinal ego) as well as aspects of the self never actualized because of the lack of an appropriately facilitating maternal environment (Winnicott’s true self).
Guntrip’s concept of the regressed ego has a broad applicability to those analysands who experience and portray themselves (both in dreams and in waking fantasies) as small infants, often neglected or abandoned, particularly at points in their analysis where previously unintegrated and inaccessible feeling states and longings are reached. This kind of approach has also been disseminated by popular psychology through such concepts as “the inner child.” Guntrip’s approach, however, always remained deeply psychoanalytic, in his conviction that the repressed ego cannot be reached in any authentic, therapeutically useful fashion until the slow, painstaking analysis of more surface, defensive layers of the personality are worked through.
The independent group within the British Psychoanalytic Society has had an enormous impact on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis in recent decades. In their clear, explicit break with Freud’s drive theory, Fairbairn and Bowlby radically realigned thinking on the nature of mind, development, and the analytic situation. Bowlby’s work attained only a minor status within psychoanalysis proper, but spawned a productive and influential line of research and theorizing on attachment that has filtered into popular attitudes toward the importance of bonding between parents and infants, influencing both private lives and public policy. Fairbairn’s work has had an increasing effect on the movement toward a “two-person psychology” within psychoanalysis, particularly in the more recent integration of object relations theory and interpersonal theory in current relational psychoanalysis (see chapter 9). Winnicott, although he never explicitly broke with Freudian tradition, introduced an evocative vision of early development that has had broad impact both within and outside psychoanalysis proper. And Winnicott’s depictions of parental functions such as the holding environment provided powerful new developmental metaphors for thinking about the analytic relationship and the analytic process.