Playing and Reality, Winnicott (1971)
(1) Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena
Transitional Objects Described. It is common for an infant to become deeply attached to a specific toy or object. “The parents get to know [this object’s] value and carry it round when travelling. The mother lets it get dirty and even smelly, knowing that by washing it she introduces a break in continuity in the infant's experience, a break that may destroy the meaning and value of the object to the infant.” It is during times of sickness and distress in which the infant most tenaciously clings to the object. As he grows, he gradually loses interest in the object.
What is going on here? What makes this object so important? Winnicott’s answer is that the infant imbues the object with some special, fantastical quality, a type of power that another object with identical physical characteristics would not possess. We’ve all experienced an infant taking “part of a sheet or blanket, into the mouth with the fingers.” As this happens, Winnicott writes, it’s easy to “suppose that thinking, or fantasying, gets linked up with these functional experiences.”
The object exists in the infant’s imagination somewhere between fantasy/subjectivity and reality/objectivity. The object is real; it’s not a hallucination. But to the infant, the object seems “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.” Such an objection is an illusion.
To further illustrate the idea of a transitional object, he talks about two babies, one of whom had a stuffed rabbit that he would sometimes cuddle. This stuffed animal was a “comforter” but it was never, “as a true transitional object would have been, more important than the mother, an almost inseparable part of the infant.” By contrast, another baby had a blanket he called “Baa.” This blanket “was not a ‘comforter’ as in the case of the [other baby] but a ‘soother’. It was a sedative which always worked.” The second baby’s parents knew that “if anyone gave him his ‘Baa’ he would immediately suck it and lose anxiety, and in fact he would go to sleep within a few minutes if the time for sleep were at all near.”
Development. The mother must be good-enough if her infant is to “proceed from the pleasure principle to the reality principle” and if he is to grow out of primary identification (meaning if he is to come to realize that he and his mother are different). The good-enough mother initially makes an “almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs,” allowing him to believe in his own omnipotence. For example, the mother is so attuned and accommodating that as soon as he begins to feel, she gives him her breast. This gives the infant the illusion that he is omnipotent. The infant’s experience of the breast, in other words, is similar to his later experience of a transitional object, falling between fantasy and reality.
Weaning marks the beginning of disillusionment and with it “reality-acceptance.” Of course, we never completely attain reality-acceptance. We’re never freed “from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.).” He adds that when one adult forces another person “to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own,” we say that that person is mad. However, if we’re able “to enjoy the personal intermediate area without making claims, then we can acknowledge our own corresponding intermediate areas, and are pleased to find a degree of overlapping, that is to say common experience between members of a group in art or religion or philosophy.”
(6) The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications
Winnicott begins by noting that what he’s about to say in this chapter is not something he would have been able to say two decades earlier. Only recently has he developed the patience needed to withhold making interpretations until the patient develops trust in the psychoanalytic setting. “If only we can wait,” he writes, “the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever.” He adds: “I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or become aware of it with acceptance.”
Interpretation, he has found, only works if the patient is able “to place the analyst outside the area of subjective phenomena.” Rather, the patient must know how to use the analyst as an object. The difference here is between object-relating and object-usage. In object-relating, we’re using projection, mistaking something in us as existing in the object; we’re also using identification, mistaking something in the object as something in us. Because identification is taking place, we find ourselves somewhat depleted.
Thomas Ogden interprets this chapter as follows. (Ogden, 2016, “Destruction Reconceived: On Winnicott's ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications.’”)
What mother has not had the very painful experience of feeling that she has utterly failed as a mother, and what's more, she has ceased to be the person she was before she had the baby? The destruction of the mother's experience of herself as a mother may take innumerable forms, for instance, by her coming to feel that she is not fit to be a mother because she is unable to console her baby when he is in terrible distress, or is not sufficiently loving for the infant to nurse at the breast, or unable to help her infant sleep when he is so desperately in need of sleep, or hating her baby for keeping her from all of the pleasures and sources of pride and competence and creativity that she had had in her life before the baby was born, or any of a thousand other ways an infant or child may actually destroy his mother's belief in her adequacy as a mother (and, at times, her adequacy as a worthwhile person of any sort) The baby does not do this in an effort to attack his mother or destroy her; he does so simply by being the infant he is — an infant who places relentless physical and emotional demands on the mother, demands that no mother can meet. The mother's feeling of becoming destroyed is simply a part of the experience of being a mother to an infant or child, an experience that is at once mundane and unimaginably intense, painful, draining, gratifying, terrifying, and blissful.
Ogden writes that the infant’s destruction is not necessarily done in anger. He writes that at one point “Winnicott uses the phrase ‘destruction turns up’ (to which I referred earlier), which I view as an elegant way of expressing the idea that the infant destroys the mother without anger and without the intention of destroying her. Destruction ‘turns up’ because a healthy infant or child asks (demands!) a great deal from his or her mother, more than any mother can provide.”
7. Similarly, the analyst must survive the patient’s destruction. For example, the analyst must not become defensive, for instance, by making interpretations “that attempt to defuse the intensity of the patient’s feelings.” When an analyst cannot survive a patient’s destruction, patient’s emotional and physical state often suffers. “In consulting to an analyst who is feeling destroyed, I pay close attention not only to the emotional state of the analyst and his patient, but also to their physical states. This, to my mind, is a critical measure of the degree of destruction occurring in the analysis. It has been my experience that the analyst's inability to survive destruction very often involves the analyst's development of physical illness, such as severe headaches, ectopic dermatitis, and chronic insomnia. The patient, too, frequently develops forms of physical illness and self-destructive behaviors.”
Transitional Objects Described. It is common for an infant to become deeply attached to a specific toy or object. “The parents get to know [this object’s] value and carry it round when travelling. The mother lets it get dirty and even smelly, knowing that by washing it she introduces a break in continuity in the infant's experience, a break that may destroy the meaning and value of the object to the infant.” It is during times of sickness and distress in which the infant most tenaciously clings to the object. As he grows, he gradually loses interest in the object.
What is going on here? What makes this object so important? Winnicott’s answer is that the infant imbues the object with some special, fantastical quality, a type of power that another object with identical physical characteristics would not possess. We’ve all experienced an infant taking “part of a sheet or blanket, into the mouth with the fingers.” As this happens, Winnicott writes, it’s easy to “suppose that thinking, or fantasying, gets linked up with these functional experiences.”
The object exists in the infant’s imagination somewhere between fantasy/subjectivity and reality/objectivity. The object is real; it’s not a hallucination. But to the infant, the object seems “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.” Such an objection is an illusion.
To further illustrate the idea of a transitional object, he talks about two babies, one of whom had a stuffed rabbit that he would sometimes cuddle. This stuffed animal was a “comforter” but it was never, “as a true transitional object would have been, more important than the mother, an almost inseparable part of the infant.” By contrast, another baby had a blanket he called “Baa.” This blanket “was not a ‘comforter’ as in the case of the [other baby] but a ‘soother’. It was a sedative which always worked.” The second baby’s parents knew that “if anyone gave him his ‘Baa’ he would immediately suck it and lose anxiety, and in fact he would go to sleep within a few minutes if the time for sleep were at all near.”
Development. The mother must be good-enough if her infant is to “proceed from the pleasure principle to the reality principle” and if he is to grow out of primary identification (meaning if he is to come to realize that he and his mother are different). The good-enough mother initially makes an “almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs,” allowing him to believe in his own omnipotence. For example, the mother is so attuned and accommodating that as soon as he begins to feel, she gives him her breast. This gives the infant the illusion that he is omnipotent. The infant’s experience of the breast, in other words, is similar to his later experience of a transitional object, falling between fantasy and reality.
Weaning marks the beginning of disillusionment and with it “reality-acceptance.” Of course, we never completely attain reality-acceptance. We’re never freed “from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.).” He adds that when one adult forces another person “to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own,” we say that that person is mad. However, if we’re able “to enjoy the personal intermediate area without making claims, then we can acknowledge our own corresponding intermediate areas, and are pleased to find a degree of overlapping, that is to say common experience between members of a group in art or religion or philosophy.”
(6) The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications
Winnicott begins by noting that what he’s about to say in this chapter is not something he would have been able to say two decades earlier. Only recently has he developed the patience needed to withhold making interpretations until the patient develops trust in the psychoanalytic setting. “If only we can wait,” he writes, “the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever.” He adds: “I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or become aware of it with acceptance.”
Interpretation, he has found, only works if the patient is able “to place the analyst outside the area of subjective phenomena.” Rather, the patient must know how to use the analyst as an object. The difference here is between object-relating and object-usage. In object-relating, we’re using projection, mistaking something in us as existing in the object; we’re also using identification, mistaking something in the object as something in us. Because identification is taking place, we find ourselves somewhat depleted.
Object-relating must occur before object-usage can occur. In object-usage we’re not projecting ourselves into the object but recognizing the object “as an entity in its own right.” The change from object-relating to object-usage requires us to destroy the object and for the object to survive the destruction. We can now “use the object that has survived.”
Thomas Ogden interprets this chapter as follows. (Ogden, 2016, “Destruction Reconceived: On Winnicott's ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications.’”)
1. The infant must relate to the object before he can use the object. In object-relating, the infant does not see the object as she really is but is projecting parts of himself onto her. In object-usage, the infant sees the object as a separate person.
2. To move from object-relating to object-usage, the infant must destroy the external object. Although some have taken this to mean that the infant must destroy the internal object, Ogden takes this to mean that the infant destroys the real external object. To destroy the object means you make the object feel like a failure. That is, the infant, by simply being an infant, at times makes the mother feel like she’s failed at being a mother. Ogden writes:
2. To move from object-relating to object-usage, the infant must destroy the external object. Although some have taken this to mean that the infant must destroy the internal object, Ogden takes this to mean that the infant destroys the real external object. To destroy the object means you make the object feel like a failure. That is, the infant, by simply being an infant, at times makes the mother feel like she’s failed at being a mother. Ogden writes:
What mother has not had the very painful experience of feeling that she has utterly failed as a mother, and what's more, she has ceased to be the person she was before she had the baby? The destruction of the mother's experience of herself as a mother may take innumerable forms, for instance, by her coming to feel that she is not fit to be a mother because she is unable to console her baby when he is in terrible distress, or is not sufficiently loving for the infant to nurse at the breast, or unable to help her infant sleep when he is so desperately in need of sleep, or hating her baby for keeping her from all of the pleasures and sources of pride and competence and creativity that she had had in her life before the baby was born, or any of a thousand other ways an infant or child may actually destroy his mother's belief in her adequacy as a mother (and, at times, her adequacy as a worthwhile person of any sort) The baby does not do this in an effort to attack his mother or destroy her; he does so simply by being the infant he is — an infant who places relentless physical and emotional demands on the mother, demands that no mother can meet. The mother's feeling of becoming destroyed is simply a part of the experience of being a mother to an infant or child, an experience that is at once mundane and unimaginably intense, painful, draining, gratifying, terrifying, and blissful.
Ogden writes that the infant’s destruction is not necessarily done in anger. He writes that at one point “Winnicott uses the phrase ‘destruction turns up’ (to which I referred earlier), which I view as an elegant way of expressing the idea that the infant destroys the mother without anger and without the intention of destroying her. Destruction ‘turns up’ because a healthy infant or child asks (demands!) a great deal from his or her mother, more than any mother can provide.”
3. By destroying the object, the object becomes real. In other words, the infant “senses the pain that his mother (as a real person, not as his omnipotent creation) actually feels as she is becoming destroyed.” The infant “sees in his mother’s eyes, hears in her voice, feels in the way she holds him the pain she is experiencing as she is ‘becoming destroyed.’” The mother is not longer a “a bundle of projections” but a real, separate person.
5. The mother must survive the destruction. The mother is able to survive the infant’s destruction “because she is a real person — an adult with mature (as well as primitive emotions), ideas and psychological capacities of her own, which she is able to bring to bear on the experience of actually being destroyed.” In other words, she is able to “recover her sense of herself as a good enough mother, even as she is ‘becoming destroyed’ as a good enough mother.”
6. The infant must see that the mother has survived the destruction. The mother must not only survive the destruction but must also communicate to her infant that she has survived. “She makes this communication in the myriad ways in which she is genuinely alive and loving in her way of being with her baby — which the infant awaits anxiously (after he destroys her) and celebrates when he finds it.” The analyst similarly must survive the patient’s attacks. “In other words, the analyst must not impede the patient's destructive attacks, nor should he become defensive, for instance, by the defensive use of interpretations that attempt to defuse the intensity of the patient's feelings.” “The urge to retaliate on the part of the mother/ analyst is fully understandable - we all, as parents and as analysts, have felt the impulse to retaliate in the face of repeated experiences of becoming destroyed as parents and as analysts. But there are periods in the process of moving from object-relating to object-usage during which retaliation of any sort is experienced by the infant or patient as an attack on his sanity (more accurately, his psyche-soma).”
5. The mother must survive the destruction. The mother is able to survive the infant’s destruction “because she is a real person — an adult with mature (as well as primitive emotions), ideas and psychological capacities of her own, which she is able to bring to bear on the experience of actually being destroyed.” In other words, she is able to “recover her sense of herself as a good enough mother, even as she is ‘becoming destroyed’ as a good enough mother.”
6. The infant must see that the mother has survived the destruction. The mother must not only survive the destruction but must also communicate to her infant that she has survived. “She makes this communication in the myriad ways in which she is genuinely alive and loving in her way of being with her baby — which the infant awaits anxiously (after he destroys her) and celebrates when he finds it.” The analyst similarly must survive the patient’s attacks. “In other words, the analyst must not impede the patient's destructive attacks, nor should he become defensive, for instance, by the defensive use of interpretations that attempt to defuse the intensity of the patient's feelings.” “The urge to retaliate on the part of the mother/ analyst is fully understandable - we all, as parents and as analysts, have felt the impulse to retaliate in the face of repeated experiences of becoming destroyed as parents and as analysts. But there are periods in the process of moving from object-relating to object-usage during which retaliation of any sort is experienced by the infant or patient as an attack on his sanity (more accurately, his psyche-soma).”
Needless to say, being destroyed is not easy. “Winnicott, in his BBC radio broadcasts and in the books he wrote for the general public (Winnicott, 1969b), tried to help mothers and fathers become more accepting of themselves as parents (including their feelings of anger and defeat at the hands of their infant). In his paper, ‘Hate in the Countertransference’ (1947), Winnicott attempts to do something similar for analysts. Perhaps most analysts have the humility to admit that they are not able to be of help to every patient he or she accepts for analysis. What is more difficult to admit is that there are times when we, as analysts, are unable to survive destruction in an analysis we are conducting, and yet, to the detriment of the patient and ourselves, we continue to work with the patient (sometimes without seeking consultation or further personal analysis).”
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