Donald Winnicott
Donald Woods Winnicott was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory and developmental psychology. He was a leading member of the British Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society, President of the British Psychoanalytical Society twice, and a close associate of British writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner.
Winnicott is best known for his ideas on the true self and false self, the "good enough" parent, and he and his second wife, Clare, arguably his chief professional collaborator, worked with the notion of the transitional object. He wrote several books, including Playing and Reality, and more than 200 papers.
Early life and education
Winnicott was born on 7 April 1896 in Plymouth, Devon, England, to Sir John Frederick Winnicott and Elizabeth Martha, daughter of chemist and druggist William Woods, of Plymouth. Sir John Winnicott was a partner in the family firm, in business as hardware merchants and manufacturers, and was knighted in 1924, having served twice as mayor of Plymouth; he was also a magistrate and alderman. The Winnicott family were staunch, civic-minded Methodists.The family was prosperous and ostensibly happy, but behind the veneer, Winnicott saw himself as oppressed by his mother, who tended toward depression, as well as by his two sisters and his nanny. He would eventually speak of 'his own early childhood experience of trying to make "my living" by keeping his mother alive'. His father's influence was that of an enterprising freethinker who encouraged his son's creativity. Winnicott described himself as a disturbed adolescent, reacting against his own self-restraining "goodness" acquired from trying to assuage the dark moods of his mother.
He first thought of studying medicine while at The Leys School, a boarding school in Cambridge, after fracturing his clavicle and recording in his diary that he wished he could treat himself. He began pre-clinical studies in biology, physiology and anatomy at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1914 but, with the onset of World War I, his studies were interrupted when he was made a medical trainee at the temporary hospital in Cambridge. In 1917, he joined the Royal Navy as a medical officer on the destroyer HMS Lucifer.
Having graduated from Cambridge with a third-class degree, he began studies in clinical medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London. During this time, he learned from his mentor the art of listening carefully when taking medical histories from patients, a skill that he would later identify as foundational to his practice as a psychoanalyst.
Career
Winnicott completed his medical studies in 1920, and in 1923, the same year as his marriage to the artist Alice Buxton Winnicott. She was a potter and they married on 7 July 1923 in St Mary's Church, Frensham. Alice had "severe psychological difficulties" and Winnicott arranged for her and his own therapy to address the difficulties this condition created. He obtained a post as physician at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London, where he was to work as a paediatrician and child psychoanalyst for 40 years. In 1923 he began a ten-year psychoanalysis with James Strachey, and in 1927 he began training as an analytic candidate. Strachey discussed Winnicott's case with his wife Alix Strachey, apparently reporting that Winnicott's sex life was affected by his anxieties. Winnicott's second analysis, beginning in 1936, was with Joan Riviere.Winnicott rose to prominence as a psychoanalyst just as the followers of Anna Freud were in conflict with those of Melanie Klein for the right to be called Sigmund Freud's "true intellectual heirs". Out of the Controversial discussions during World War II, a compromise was reached with three more-or-less amicable groups within the psychoanalytic movement: the Anna Freudians, the Kleinians, and the Middle Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society, to which Winnicott belonged, along with Ronald Fairbairn, Michael Balint, Masud Khan, John Bowlby, Marion Milner, and Margaret Little.
During the Second World War, Winnicott served as consultant paediatrician to the children's evacuation programme. During the war, he met and worked with Clare Britton, a psychiatric social worker who became his colleague in treating children displaced from their homes by wartime evacuation. Winnicott was lecturing after the war and Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie of the BBC asked him to give over sixty talks on the radio between 1943 and 1966. His first series of talks in 1943 was titled "Happy Children". As a result of the success of these talks, Quigley offered him total control over the content of his talks but this soon became more consultative as Quigley advised him on the correct pitch.
After the war, Winnicott also saw patients in his private practice. Among contemporaries influenced by him was R. D. Laing, who wrote to Winnicott in 1958 acknowledging his help.
Winnicott divorced his first wife in 1949 and married Clare Britton in 1951. A keen observer of children as a social worker and a psychoanalyst in her own right, she had an important influence on the development of his theories and likely acted as midwife to his prolific publications after they met.
Except for one book published in 1931, all of Winnicott's books were published after 1944, including The Ordinary Devoted Mother and Her Baby, The Child and the Family, Playing and Reality, and Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis.
Winnicott died on 25 January 1971, following the last of a series of heart attacks and was cremated in London. Clare Winnicott oversaw the posthumous publication of several of his works.
Concept of holding
Winnicott's paediatric work with children and their mothers led to the development of his influential concept concerning the "holding environment". Winnicott claimed that "the foundations of health are laid down by the ordinary mother in her ordinary loving care of her own baby", central to which was the mother's attentive holding of her child.Winnicott considered that the "mother's technique of holding, of bathing, of feeding, everything she did for the baby, added up to the child's first idea of the mother", as well as fostering the ability to experience the body as the place wherein one securely lives. Extrapolating the concept of holding from mother to family and the outside world, Winnicott saw as key to healthy development "the continuation of reliable holding in terms of the ever-widening circle of family and school and social life".
Winnicott was influential in viewing the work of the psychotherapist as offering a substitute holding environment based on the mother/infant bond. Winnicott wrote: "A correct and well-timed interpretation in an analytic treatment gives a sense of being held physically that is more real...than if a real holding or nursing had taken place. Understanding goes deeper".
His theoretical writings emphasised empathy, imagination, and, in the words of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has been a proponent of his work, "the highly particular transactions that constitute love between two imperfect people."
Transitional phenomena and transitional objects
Winnicott introduced the concepts of transitional objects and transitional phenomena in his 1951 paper "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena" and later elaborated on these ideas in his book Playing and Reality These concepts are among his most enduring and widely influential contributions to developmental psychology and psychoanalytic theory. He saw the transitional object as the first "not-me" possession, enabling the child to navigate between inner psychic reality and external shared reality. This concept formed a cornerstone of his broader theories about play, creativity, and cultural experience throughout life.Concept and definition
Transitional phenomena refer to the intermediate developmental stage between a baby's inability and growing ability to recognize and accept reality. During this stage, the infant exists in an intermediate state between total fusion with the mother and recognition of the mother as separate from the self. The transitional object facilitates this developmental process by serving as a symbolic substitute for the mother-infant bond.The transitional object represents the infant's journey from a state of being merged with the mother to a state of being in relation to the mother as something outside and separate. Winnicott emphasised that the transitional object is not the mother substitute but represents the infant's transition from a state of being merged with the mother to a state of being in relation to the mother as something outside and separate.
Characteristics of transitional objects
According to Winnicott, the transitional object has several distinctive characteristics:- The infant assumes rights over the object, which are respected by adults
- The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated
- It must never change, unless changed by the infant
- It must survive instinctual loving, hating, and aggression
- It must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own
- It comes from without from our point of view, but not from within from the point of view of the baby
- Its fate is to be gradually decathected, becoming not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo
Transitional space