Chapter 10

Winnicott’s capacity for silence in understanding and healing human nature

Margaret Boyle Spelman

Silent communication

As witnessed by the contents of this book, silence has been given much attention in many spheres and particularly within ‘the talking cure’ professions. At the inception of Freud’s psychoanalysis the emphasis was on what was said; the interpretation. Silence was considered to be a sign of the patient’s pathology and resistance to treatment. I propose in this chapter that Winnicott’s thinking has contributed significantly to the reshaping of the profession’s idea of silence, seeing silence and the capacity for silence differently now; it is a sign of health and an important developmental milestone for the human subject with important ramifications for treatment and technique in the psychoanalytic consulting room.

Although the concept of the individual human subject is a relatively recent one in human history, it is precisely this period of life, the fragile beginnings of individual subjectivity that Donald Woods Winnicott privileges (Boyle Spelman, 2013a, 2013b). His thinking of 40-plus years (Boyle Spelman and Thomson-Salo, 2014) is therefore also inevitably an important consideration of silence.

The experience of writing this chapter can be described thus: I went to make my own creation, ‘my own cake’, so to speak; my ‘twist’ on Winnicott’s original recipe, a unique perspective using clinical vignettes from my professional life. But instead, in what I trust was a necessary step involving the postponement of my original conscious intention, I became enthralled by the individual ingredients and the original recipe of Winnicott’s elaborate and enduring creation on the subject of human nature and silence. Reflecting my distraction and absorption and intending to be of clinical and general use, this chapter is a chronologically ordered whistle-stop tour of a personal selection of Winnicott’s ideas on silence and on pre-Oedipal psychical life. The ‘tour’ foregrounds three themes; the importance of silence for the individual patient, silence as a transitional object and the function of silence in the consulting room between the patient–analyst dyad.

The importance of silence for the individual patient

Relatively ignored by Freud in favour of the later stage of the Oedipus complex, the baby’s earliest developmental period journeys from late pregnancy, through the individual’s birth into what for Freud was ‘autoeroticism’ and ‘primary narcissism’ and then on to the establishment of a rudimentary boundary (the first recognition of the ‘me’/‘not me’ distinction) in the context of the first object choice within the environment of the nursing couple; the baby’s absolute and then relative dependence on the mother’s care. Freud’s relative inattention to this earliest developmental time is recognized by Goldman (1993) when he suggests that Winnicott made it his life’s work to elaborate what Freud put in a footnote.

Winnicott does indeed bring to life this important pre-Oedipal stage that is ‘preverbal, unverbalized and unverbalizable’ (1967, p. 112) and a silence interspersed with sounds; he emphasizes all that happens outside language and before words. Winnicott includes early behaviour and the rich variety in the quality of silences that occurs within the nursing couple. His oeuvre is a passionately observed exposition of the development of the unique human subject in the early environment of the ‘ordinary devoted’ mother and her habits of baby care. In parallel Winnicott explored the traces of this earliest time of life and its vagaries as they manifest between the analytic couple, the therapist and patient, in the clinical psychoanalytic encounter.

Although eventually a fully-fledged human being, what Winnicott saw as the newly born ‘bundle of anatomy and physiology’ can only be considered a psychical entity as an infant–mother unit and when one includes along with the baby, the care of the ‘ordinary devoted’ mother; Freud’s aforementioned footnote (Freud, 1911, p. 220). In detailing the prehistory and early history of the human being and in exploring its lessons for psychoanalytic technique, Winnicott believes that as a Freudian, he is simply taking up where Freud left off.

In his early days as a pediatrician, as shown in his first book Clinical Notes on Disorders of Childhood, Winnicott (1931) wished to inform his medical colleagues of how, by history-taking and observation of the child’s clinical presentation, one can differentially diagnose the emotional disorder which speaks silently through bodily symptoms from ordinary organic disease.

Winnicott shows that so much is happening between the baby and the mother at the beginning. The good enough mother by her perfect adaptation to the baby’s needs creates a situation for her baby, an illusion of unity, which allows the baby the experience of omnipotence and to simply ‘be’ in demand-free relaxed identification with their mother. From their own perspective, the absolutely but obliviously dependent baby ‘is’ the mother and the mother ‘is’ the baby. Through this reliable care experienced over time, the baby builds a confidence that what they need they will create/find (with creating and finding being paradoxically considered identical). In unconscious fantasy, the baby also ‘destroys’ the mother who repeatedly survives the greedy primitive loving of feeding.

Over time there is important growth which is met by a very significant change in the mother’s approach; the mother’s reliable care and her survival of these instinctual attacks allow the baby’s rudimentary personal boundary to begin to build so that what Winnicott calls ‘unit status’ is gradually achieved and the child is their real self, with a boundary and an inside and an outside. The baby will also begin to understand that as the baby of quiet baby care or the baby of ruthless instinctual greed they are always one and the same baby. The baby will also slowly come to understand that the mother of quiet baby-care (environment mother) and the mother the baby ‘destroys’ (in unconscious fantasy) by feeding (object mother) are one and the same. Attuned to her baby’s momentary fluctuations and growing understanding, the mother makes a very important change which signals the baby’s entry into the stage of relative dependence: She now awaits a signal of need from her baby when – from the baby’s perspective – they are separate rather than immediately anticipating and gratifying her baby’s need as she does when they are merged in unity. The sensitive and adaptive mother titrates her response to a separate or merged baby, knowing how much waiting and how much anticipating is appropriate at any given moment. This in turn adds to the baby’s growing sense of self in what is now a time of relative dependence.

Winnicott emphasizes the importance of a prerequisite silence for authentic experience. In his paper ‘The observations of infants in a set situation’ (1941) Winnicott shows that in deference to the scientific method, he set up his ordinary professional encounter with the mother–baby couple in his office as a ‘controlled experimental environment’ with a ‘standard procedure’ by which to observe the baby’s mental health. He would offer and then leave a spatula (tongue depressor) for the baby as they sat on their mother’s knee across from him. From this situation Winnicott made far-reaching deductions about the nature of healthy human experience. There are three parts to the full experience which involves communication which is outside language and is simply in behaviour; first the baby delays taking an interest in the spatula and allows their desire and curiosity to build until such time as they then take the spatula and play intently with it before finally losing interest and discarding it.

Winnicott recognized the importance of all three parts of the baby’s experience. But what is particular to Winnicott is that he notes the necessity of the first part, the period of hesitation and the baby’s distress if urged to take the spatula before they are ready. Applying his finding to all human experience, Winnicott deduces that any creative, spontaneous approach to the world, anything arising from the ‘true self’ – rather than from the ‘false self’ (of conformity or demand) – can only arise after this important ‘period of hesitation’. With silent waiting the experience and self-experience is transformed. Something is happening before anything appears to be happening. In life or in the consulting room, within simply ‘being’ – while apparently ‘doing nothing’ – is the spring of all that is alive, enjoyable, creative and real in human experience.

It has often been noted that Winnicott’s thinking on human nature consists of an elaborate system of interrelated concepts which seems to have existed within Winnicott in its entirety from the beginning (Boyle Spelman, 2013b). The system is given in embryonic form in his paper ‘Primitive emotional development’ (1945). Winnicott remarks here that he is saying something new within psychoanalysis: he attends not to relationships with others but to the patient’s relationship with their own self and their conscious and unconscious phantasies about it. This existential psychoanalysis gives attention to the earliest stage of human development prior to language and to its new edition within psychoanalytic treatment.

Winnicott details the environment that pertains in the mother’s sensitively adaptive care for both her baby’s instinctual life and the illusion of unity needed for support of the baby’s immature ego. The mother provides her baby with a sufficiently long experience of their own omnipotence within a relaxed identification with her. From the baby’s perspective they provide for their own need to feed and to be cared for. It is understood that ‘creating’ and ‘finding’ amount to the same thing for the baby. By the mother’s ‘ordinary devoted attention’ the baby grows in three ways:

Also the mother provides the facilitating environment for this by the holding (ego support), handling (reinforcing her baby’s boundary through baby care) and object-presenting (showing the baby what they mean to their mother by the nature of her gaze and by her demeanour when she looks at her baby).

Difficulties arising for the adult patient from this early time have been detailed by Winnicott and expanded on by others including Masud Khan (1979). In the clinical encounter they are addressed by the reliability of the setting. The setting can here be seen as the silent constant in the relationship, a framing device. It is not often mentioned directly but there can be much action around it. Features can become very significant: the plants in the garden on the way in, the pictures in the room, the scent of the hand cream in the bathroom, seasonal light, noises off; the analyst’s interested aliveness and reliability as well as the physical details of the couch, the room, session arrangements, beginning and ending times. More than anything spoken, the most important aspect often is the opportunity provided for the analytic dyad to live through experiences together.

The road to mature subjectivity is a long and gradual one with progressions and regressions during which the mother becomes less and less a subjective object which the baby finds/creates and becomes more and more an object objectively perceived, a whole and separate person. Winnicott details the baby’s psychological growth from the first relative silence-with-noise featuring blurred vision, smell, kinaesthetic and tactile impressions to the baby later sitting in their mother’s lap and, later still, taking turns with her in a game to which they both contribute and which is the prelude to the to and fro of conversation. It is the detail of this early ‘good enough’ environment which accounts for much individual difference and distinguishes the individual who can approach life creatively and with enjoyment from one who cannot.

Silence as a transitional object

Towards the end of the 1945 paper referred to earlier, Winnicott mentions features in the baby’s environment which seem to ease the journey into separateness and to soften the ‘me’/’not me’ divide. These aspects of the environment bridge the inner and external worlds and are mysterious; e.g. clouds, breath, fluff. In the mother’s role of easing and softening her baby’s emergence from merger with her into being a separate individual, there are two stages; the creation of the illusion of unity is followed in a timely way by a gradual and sensitive disillusioning. These first ‘not-me’ objects seem to at once separate and connect, to soften the boundary and bridge inside and outside, reality and fantasy, and are the precursors to social, artistic, creative and fruitful living. These transitional phenomena, the baby’s first ‘not-me’ possessions are famously further developed by Winnicott.

In his paper ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’ (1951) Winnicott speaks of this universal journey into subjectivity – from the thumb to the teddy bear – and of the way in which the first ‘not me’ object stands for the mother and can substitute for short periods. The transitional object extends and elaborates the baby’s experience of mother’s presence. Winnicott first speaks of these transitional phenomena in relation to human development in the first transitional space which connects and separates mother and baby. He then generalizes this prototype space between the mother and her baby to include all human experience. He later expands on what he says here, that we live in this third intermediate area of experience, which lies between inner and outer realities and is contributed to by both (Winnicott, 1967b). The area acts as a resting place for the subject’s constant task of keeping inside and outside separate yet interrelated; it is the area between what is subjective and what is objectively perceived. The meaning and function of this first space which is filled with playing, dreaming and transitional phenomena is eventually neutralized when its meaning and function is inherited by and diffused out over the individual’s whole community and cultural field.

If things have not gone well in the original instance it will be silently revisited in the course of the psychoanalysis and the analyst’s tasks will reflect those of the adaptive mother. What is at issue here is the first part of the growing individual’s lifetime journey from the illusion of unity (when it will never be asked ‘Did you find this or create it?’) through sensitive disillusionment, i.e. from feeling merged or at one with their mother and environment to true object relating with a mainly objectively perceived mother.

In his 1951 paper on the subject, Winnicott speaks of the journey from the baby’s primary unawareness of indebtedness to their mother to their recognition of and concern for their mother as a whole separate person to whom they are indebted. The baby now has concern for her and has a retrospective understanding that their parents cared for them out of love.

In his paper ‘Withdrawal and regression’ (1954) Winnicott presents the case of a patient who had momentary ‘sleep-like’ withdrawals during analytic sessions. The withdrawal was an example of a patient providing himself with ego support and ‘holding’. If the analyst can recognize the regression to dependence and meet the patient’s need to be held then the patient can profit from the experience of the analyst’s adaption-to-need and regress in service of their ego. By virtue of the holding and the silence a previously split-off part of the patient can be integrated into their personality.

Silence between the analyst and patient

Silent holding

In his paper ‘The capacity to be alone’ (1958) Winnicott begins by explaining that the arrival of silence in the consulting room shows the patient’s capacity for solitude. It can happen variously; as a long period of silence or even in one completely silent session. A person may be solitary and unable to be alone. Far from viewing the silence as it had been viewed heretofore as a defensive or a pathological resistance, Winnicott celebrates silence as the important achievement of ‘unit status’. Winnicott rejects the idea that the capacity to be alone – with silence as its outward manifestation – is a very sophisticated thing achieved after the time of the Oedipus Complex; rather it is Winnicott’s view that the capacity to be alone, or in absorbed silence, is a phenomenon arising in earliest life when little or no ego maturity can be assumed.

The essential prerequisite for this capacity is a sufficiency for the baby and small child of a paradoxical experience of being alone in the presence of the mother/primary caregiver. This person is reliably present even if sometimes only represented by the crib or the buggy. The baby’s ego immaturity is balanced against the ego support of the mother and this support is then gradually introjected. The later capacities – to play, to dream, to relax, to enjoy one’s self, to become creatively absorbed in a task – all come from the child’s repeated experience of forgetting their mother and surroundings while playing or day-dreaming and of then finding everything as they left it and mother receptive and welcoming when remembered having been temporarily forgotten.

Silent integration

It must be emphasized clearly here that for Winnicott an important prerequisite for the achievement of the capacity for silence is the integration into the personality of the aggressive and libidinal instincts through what he calls ego-relatedness and id-relatedness. This requires a good enough experience of an ‘environment mother’ of quiet baby-care and ego support and also of an ‘object mother’ who survives and welcomes the baby’s instinctual loving feeding attack. It is worth noting that this plays out when there is no recognition of the mother and no realization that these two ‘mothers’ are one and the same mother. Winnicott gives the example of the ego-relatedness of the post-coital couple when one or both of the individuals are alone but in the crucial presence of the other.

Winnicott examines three statements (‘I’, ‘I am’ and ‘I am alone’) connected to the achievement of the capacity to be silently alone. ‘I’ refers to the achievement of one’s personal unit self. ‘I am’ implies one’s continuing existence facilitated by the unacknowledged mother. The statement ‘I am alone’ represents a state of affairs which is only possible after the mother is recognized as a whole, separate person. But it is based in sufficient early experiences of being alone in the presence of another who adapted to one’s need without making demands or seeking recognition.

Winnicott explains that the ‘internal environment’ that eventually allows the child to forgo the need of the presence of the mother or her symbols is a more primitive phenomenon than is an ‘introjected mother’. And theoretically, even when able to be alone, the person with whom one was in identified unity as a young baby, is always present, consciously or unconsciously. Winnicott uses the term ‘ego orgasm’ for these enjoyable quiet experiences such as close friendship.

The patient’s and the child’s silence

In his paper ‘The theory of the parent-infant relationship’ (1960) the child’s journey (and the parallel journey in undergoing psychoanalysis), is from absolute dependence, through relative dependence towards independence. Winnicott reminds us that before word representation the infant is dependent on care that is based on empathy rather than understanding. Anxiety related to this time is not one of separation or castration but rather the anxiety of annihilation. Winnicott explains that in his technique for classical psychoanalysis Freud wrongly took for granted that everything goes well in infancy. He quotes Freud who – in the famous footnote – notes that given the baby’s neglect of the Reality Principle and enslavement to the Pleasure Principle, they can only be considered as a psychical organization ‘provided that one includes with [them] the care that [they] [receive] from [their] mother – [and that then they] [do] almost realize a psychical system…’ (1911, p. 220).

Winnicott details in this paper the way in which the analyst must wait, often for a long time, to allow for the patient’s needed experience (perhaps for the first time) of the good enough environment – the physical features of the setting and the analyst’s attitude – as dependable and reliable over time. It is only after this is sufficiently experienced that the patient’s ego strengthens and they can benefit from interpretations and the ‘talking’ part of the therapy.

There must first be the ‘holding’ of environmental provision for inherited potential to naturally unfold in both human development and in psychotherapy. Winnicott speaks about the indwelling of the psyche in the soma with the skin as the limiting membrane. Then comes living an experience together and then the Oedipal situation of father, mother and baby all living together.

In this paper Winnicott draws the parallel between the patient struggling with difficulties from a developmental stage before the Oedipus complex and the baby at the stage of absolute dependence. The sensitivity that naturally occurs in the mother/analyst of the reliable setting is first based on empathy for a sufficient period before the understanding of a later stage and its technique of analytic interpretation is suitable or useful.

Winnicott’s paper entitled ‘Fear of breakdown’ (1963a) addresses five primitive agonies; anxieties that are often silently experienced in the course of therapy. For Winnicott the breakdown that the patient fears may be one that has already been experienced at a time when the person was not sufficiently ‘there’ or present in terms of ego formation. It is ‘unconscious’ to the extent that ego integration cannot encompass it. Within the therapy the original experience is feared as if coming sometime in the future. And it cannot be relegated to the past until the ego can gather it into present-time omnipotent experience by means of the auxiliary ego function of the mother/analyst. Progress can be made if the patient can accept this strange truth and have the experience in the transference in relation to the analyst’s mistakes and failures. Winnicott suggests that the analysis succeeds when the bottom of the trough is reached and that which is feared is experienced in the present within the transference. Sometimes the silent ‘event’ that caused a kind of psychical death is a non-event, a nothing. Something was needed but not provided creating a silent emptiness. In this case the silence in the session can be a useful re-enactment of the experience but this time held in a situation where it can be worked through.

The analyst’s silence

‘Two notes on the use of silence’ (Winnicott, 1963b) features the use of silence as a technique and the crucial importance of the analyst’s capacity to wait in silence. At the time of his writing Winnicott has just been silent all week in the sessions of one particular female patient. This patient, who has read Winnicott’s writing, feels that what she is seeking is a sufficient experience of early mothering. She feels that she is achieving something she needs from Winnicott’s silence. She reacts less violently now – no longer threatening to leave – to interpretations which she calls mistakes or ‘blobs’. At this time in the analysis, for this regressed and dependent patient, interpretations are like ‘a penis bursting across the field of the breast’. The particular ‘breast’ in question for this patient is a breast which is not to be eaten (nor to be eaten by, in retaliation), rather the breast is like a general field or a cushion; the ego support provided to the infant from the mother in early life. In this example we can see how silence in the presence of the analyst felt entirely necessary to the patient, something she had waited her lifetime for.

In their silence the analyst must sometimes tolerate the patient believing things that are not true – this same patient believes that Winnicott cannot bear being silent and that this accounts for a paper-crinkling noise heard on Friday. She also believes that he is jealous as she is getting something from him that he himself has never had. Winnicott explains here the importance of the analyst’s capacity to wait in silence. He says that the listening done in silence is of a different order and includes an understanding of the function of the patient’s regression to dependence. Interpretation will simply not work and might cause suffering while the patient is relating to part-objects and when the experience of omnipotence is projected out and, as with this patient, manifesting in a feeling of being ‘doomed’. Also in these circumstances of merger, the patient’s experience of omnipotence may involve a delusional transference and then the very important function of the interpretation is often simply to let the patient know of the limits of the analyst’s understanding.

Essential silence

In his 1963 paper ‘Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of certain opposites’ Winnicott (1963c) makes important complex and sophisticated statements about the essence of the human subject and their communication. Recently Thomas Ogden (2018) has beautifully crafted an expanded exploration of the riches and nuances within this paper. Ogden says that Winnicott provides in this paper a theory of the state of being at our core; two states of a human being’s being after the achievement of communication with subjective objects and objective objects – one is the enjoyment and use of being able to communicate with an external world and the other state, which surprises Ogden, is the non-communicating self, and the absence of communication is an essential quality of this state of being. Ogden translates Winnicott as suggesting that the earliest precursor idea of communication lies in the infant’s communicating with the environment-mother. This ‘communication’ takes the form of ‘going-on-being’. This is the most undifferentiated state of being experienced by the infant and is at the core of the isolate self (Ogden, 2018).

Winnicott first lists the benefits to the patient of the analyst’s capacity for silently waiting; the interpretation is more creative and successful when it is the patient who makes it; sensitive environmental failure can lead to growth and integration; at a certain stage the most creative experience of the potentially good object is the refusal of it. But the truly vital message is about the non-communicating core of each individual and the need to protect it. Winnicott, while recognizing the sense of self that comes from communicating with external objects, also represents the sense of self that comes from the opposite need not to communicate. He protests against the horrifying idea of being infinitely exploited; eaten up, swallowed, found.

Winnicott gives the rationale for his claim: to the degree that the object is subjective, communication does not need to be explicit (Ogden usefully explains it as ‘cul-de-sac’ communication, not meant for any real or internal object but which nonetheless allows one’s experience to feel real). But to the extent that the object is objectively perceived the communication is either explicit (communication as we ordinarily think of it) or dumb (e.g. the silence of private non-compliance).

Winnicott discusses two new ideas; the individual’s use of different modes of communication and the concept of the individual’s core self as being a non-communicating ‘isolate’.

There are two opposite modes of non-communicating as the object becomes an object objectively perceived:

  1. (1) A simple non-communicating which is a natural resting between communications
  2. (2) A not-communicating that is active or reactive.

This second type can be either pathological or healthy. In the unhealthy situation the infant has developed a split because of environmental failure and there is no real communication in shared reality. Rather there is a communication with a subjective object and also a compliant false self which is actively non-communicating with the objectively perceived object.

Winnicott sees a need on occasion for an active non-communication which shows in the consulting room as a withdrawal or in compliant object-relating when silent communication with subjective objects takes over to restore balance. The healthy person also needs something corresponding to the unhealthy person’s split; a healthy use of non-communicating which helps one to feel real. Winnicott reminds us that in health the transitional phenomena of childhood give way to cultural phenomena. He sees paradoxical trends in the artist which he eventually considers to be universal; the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.

Silent communication

The silent subjective communication which Winnicott explores here comes from the time when the baby has no ego boundary and the mother’s ego support is still essential. There is no projection or introjection and without a boundary the word ‘inner’ has no real meaning. Winnicott has in mind an earlier version of that which Klein calls ‘internal’. Here ‘inner’ means ‘personal’ as it includes the mother’s essential ego-support. Winnicott notes how mystics can withdraw into an inner subjective world. Then the loss of contact with the world of shared reality is counterbalanced with a gain in feeling real; wanting to communicate and wanting to not communicate.

Winnicott says that it is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found: his female adolescent patient writes poetry just for herself, she says. And he explores with her possible bridges by which she might keep connection between her imaginative life and her everyday existence. All the while Winnicott’s main point is that there is a healthy isolated core, a protected area of silence in each of us. Thus, although healthy people communicate and enjoy communicating, each individual has a core that never communicates and is an unfound isolate.

Violation of the self’s core when communication seeps through the defences is a serious sin against the self to which parents and psychotherapists must give serious consideration. By the time they are objectively perceived, mothers have mastered the art of indirect communication through language. Transitional phenomena are there at the place where the infant begins to feel whole and separate and continuing communication with subjective phenomena enriches the feeling of being real.

Silent self

Winnicott explains the needs of the being who is growing in interrelatedness so very well. Here he brings the needs of the private silent part of the self into the picture. In the best situation there are three lines of communication: one that is forever silent; one that is explicit, direct and pleasurable; and one that derives from playing and comes into all cultural experience.

Furthermore, Winnicott suggests that it is vital that the psychoanalyst must acknowledge that the patient’s silence makes a positive contribution in the consulting room; and analytic technique must allow the patient to communicate that they are not communicating and must distinguish this state from a patient’s distress over a failure in communication. What begins as the capacity to be alone becomes a capacity for a withdrawal that is without loss of identification with that from which one has withdrawn.

In an analysis where there is a schizoid element, a period of silence may be the most positive contribution the patient can make and the analyst is then in a purposeful waiting game. Winnicott explains that in healthy development the infant starts off without life and becomes lively because of being alive; the liveliness of the child of a depressed mother is a communication that is unnatural and an intolerable handicap to the immature ego. The vagaries of the original situation may be worked through in silence in the consulting room. If the analyst fails to wait, however, there is a danger that they will suddenly become ‘not me’ and dangerously near to the patient’s central still and silent spot of ego-organization. It is in such a case that an important function of the interpretation is to let the patient know the limits of the analyst’s understanding.

This theme of the individual as an isolate has importance in the study of infancy and in the patients who have difficulties with negotiation of their personal boundary. The necessary defence is against being found before being ‘there’ to be found. Winnicott insists that at the core of the healthy individual there is a central self in silence, stillness and with no communication to the not-me world.

Conclusion: the rest is silence

This chapter may or may not appear in the pre-histories or ‘periods of hesitation’ of future creations. In any case, the tour is at an end and on reflection, my distraction was probably inevitable as Winnicott’s assembly of constituent ideas to produce an explanation for the entire of human nature, was by his own admission an overly ambitious project (1988, p. 1). But he privileged and detailed the earliest time of silent dependence in human development and, I suggest, in so doing, made an enduring and significant contribution.

This is the time of the baby’s pre-boundary experience of omnipotence and primary creativity when there was no ‘other’ to communicate with and silent dependence was a fact of life. Winnicott’s psychoanalysis can therefore accommodate the private and nonverbal part of the development of human subjectivity and experience. Although interpretation has always been a part of ‘the talking cure’, Winnicott does not stress verbal prescription or remedy. Rather he emphasizes the part of cure that involves reliable live care, listening and silent holding while living an experience together.

References

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