The Family and Individual

Development
‘Winnicott develops his themes where others would get stuck in
explicatory verbalisings . . . Psychiatrists and social scientists,
sitting half-way between the priest and engineer, enjoy a hot spot
in our democracy. It takes a man with Winnicott’s creative flair
to assure us that some can preserve their integrity while sitting
there.’
New Society

‘These essays are packed with the author’s very personal

wisdom, humanity and charm, and will illuminate the understand-
ing of any adult who reads them. If one had half a dozen copies
to whom would one give them? To a sister in charge of a children’s
ward, a health visitor, a married couple embarking on a family,
a children’s officer, a mid-wife perhaps and certainly to a
paediatrician.’
Archives of Disease in Childhood
D. W.

Winnicott
The Family and Individual
Development

With a new introduction by Martha Nussbaum

London and New York

First published 1965 by Tavistock Publications Limited
Reprinted 1989 by Routledge
Reprinted 2001 by Brunner-Routledge
First published in Routledge Classics 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1965 D. W. Winnicott
© 2006 Introduction to the Routledge Classics edition, Martha Nussbaum
Typeset in Joanna by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Winnicott, D. W. (Donald Woods), 1896–1971.
The family and individual development / D. W. Winnicott ; with a new
introduction by Martha Nussbaum.
p. ; cm.
Originally published: London : Tavistock, 1965.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN–13: 978–0–415–40277–4
ISBN–10: 0–415–40277–8
1. Developmental psychiatry. 2. Family—Psychological aspects. 3. Psychology,
Pathological. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Child Psychology. 2. Family. 3. Human Development.
4. Parent–Child Relations. WS 105 W779f 1965a]
RC454.4.W56 2006
155.4—dc22 2006017331

ISBN10: 0–415–40277–8
ISBN13: 978–0–415–40277–4
 C ONTENTS

Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction to the routledge classics
edition xii

PART I 1
1 The first year of life: modern views on the
emotional development 3
2 The relationship of a mother to her baby at
the beginning 21
3 Growth and development in immaturity 29
4 On security 42
5 The five-year-old 48
6 Integrative and disruptive factors in family life 57
7 The family affected by depressive illness in one
or both parents 72
8 The effect of psychosis on family life 88
vi contents

9 The effect of psychotic parents on the

emotional development of the child 99
10 Adolescence: struggling through the doldrums 114
11 The family and emotional maturity 128

PART II 139
12 Theoretical statement of the field of child
psychiatry 141
13 The contribution of psycho-analysis to midwifery 154
14 Advising parents 165
15 Casework with mentally ill children 176
16 The deprived child and how he can be
compensated for loss of family life 193
17 Group influences and the maladjusted child:
the school aspect 214
18 Some thoughts on the meaning of the word
democracy 228

Index 251
 P REFACE

Here I have gathered together papers given during the past

decade, mostly to groups of social workers. The central topic of
the book is the family, and the development of social groups
out of this first natural group. I have included various attempts
to state and restate the theory of the emotional growth of the
individual human child, and my justification for this is that
the structure of the family arises to a large extent out of the
tendencies towards organization in the individual personality.
The family has a clearly defined position at the place where
the developing child meets the forces that operate in society. The
prototype of this interaction is to be found in the original infant-
mother relationship in which, in an extremely complex way,
the world represented by the mother is helping or hindering
the inherited tendency of the infant to grow. It is this idea that is
developed in the course of this collection of papers, although
each was designed to meet what seemed to be the needs of the
groups concerned at a specific time and place.
viii acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish once more to thank my secretary, Mrs Joyce Coles, for her
patient and accurate work.
To Mr M. Masud Khan I am grateful for his advice and for his
work on the index.
Acknowledgement of debt is also due to the following editors,
publishers, and organizations for permission to publish material
that has already appeared in print: the Editor of the New Era in
Home and School; the Editor of the Nursing Times; the Editor of
New Society; the Editor of the British Journal of Psychiatric Social Work;
the Editor of the Medical Press; the Editor of Human Relations; the
Editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal; Butterworth & Co.
(Publishers) Ltd; the British Broadcasting Corporation.
A list of original sources is given below.
. . , ....

1 Published in the Medical Press, March 1958.

2 Lecture given to the Association of Workers for Maladjusted
Children, April 1960 (Rewritten 1964).
4 BBC broadcast, March 1960.
5 BBC broadcast, June 1962.
6 Lecture given at Goldsmith’s College, October 1957; to the
Association of Child Care Officers, May 1958; and at McGill
University, October 1960; subsequently published in the
Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 1961.
7 Lecture given at the Family Service Units Caseworkers’ Study
Weekend, October 1958.
8 Lecture to the Association of Child Care Officers, February
1960.
9 Lecture to the Association of Psychiatric Social Workers,
November 1959; subsequently published in the British Journal
of Psychiatric Social Work, vol. 6, no. 1, 1961.
10 Based on a lecture given to the Senior Staff of the London
 acknowledgements ix
County Council Children’s Department, February 1961;
subsequently published in New Era in Home and School, October
1962; and in an altered form, entitled ‘Struggling through
the Doldrums’, in New Society, 25 April 1963.
11 Lecture to the Society for Psychosomatic Research, November
1960.
12 Part of Chapter 14 in Modern Trends in Paediatrics (Second
Series), edited by A. Holzel & J. P. M. Tizard (London:
Butterworth, 1958).
13 Lecture given at a course organized by the Association of
Supervisors of Midwives; subsequently published in the
Nursing Times, 17 and 24 May 1957.
14 Lecture given at a course for midwives organized by the
Royal College of Midwives, November 1957.
15 Lecture to the Association of London County Council Child
Welfare Officers, October 1959.
16 Lecture to the Nursery School Association, July 1950.
17 Lecture to the Association of Workers for Maladjusted
Children, April 1955.
18 Published in Human Relations, vol. 3, no. 2, June 1950.
To Clare
 I NTRODUCTION TO THE
R OUTLEDGE C LASSICS E DITION

I
Unlike Freud, Donald Winnicott is not a cultural icon, read in
Great Books courses, revered and reviled. Unlike Jacques Lacan,
he is not an intellectual cult figure, with a band of zealous dis-
ciples and an impenetrable jargon. This is as he wished it.
Nobody was more skeptical of cults and the rigidity they
induced. All his life he was obsessed with the freedom of the
individual self to exist defiantly, resisting parental and cultural
demands. His writings express this commitment, speaking in a
voice that is personal, idiosyncratic, playful and, at the same
time, ordinary. That, perhaps, is why he has had a larger influ-
ence on practitioners than on theoreticians, so awkward, often,
with real people and the demands their complexity imposes.
When Winnicott burst onto the London psychoanalytic scene,
an odd rumpled man exploding with ideas (like a “Catherine
wheel” shooting off sparks, said a fellow analyst), analysts still
saw human emotions mainly in terms of Freud’s account of
primitive instinctual drives, with sexual gratification as their
xiv introduction to the routledge classics edition

goal. Melanie Klein was already making her important contribu-

tion to Freudian theory. But Klein held onto Freud’s hedonism,
seeing the infant’s search as aimed at pleasure alone. And she
insisted that the infant’s psychic drama was played out inside its
own subjective space, with figures that were the demonic projec-
tions of its own inchoate sense of parts of reality. The actual
environment and its people were of little interest to her.
Winnicott learned much from Klein, with whom he had a
close, if uneven, friendship. He absorbed from her the import-
ance of the young child’s fantasy life, to which, as a practitioner,
he had remarkable empathetic access. He insisted, however, that
the infant seeks from the start complex forms of relationship
and reciprocity, not simply its own pleasure. And the infant’s
development cannot be understood without looking at its real
surroundings, at the objects, responsive or non-responsive, that
either create a “facilitating environment” for emotional growth
or cause the self to hide, its place taken by a rigid mechanical
surrogate. Thus, he famously said, “there is no such thing as a
baby” on its own: we are always dealing with a “nursing couple.”
Winnicott also situated psychoanalysis far more accurately
than had many of its other practitioners, seeing it as an imagina-
tive humanistic endeavor, akin both to poetry and to love, rather
than as an exact science with unvarying rules. Differentiating
himself from pseudo-scientific analysts, he insisted, “We’re
concerned with living persons, whole living and loving.”

II
Donald Winnicott was born in 1896 in the West of England, to a
prosperous middle-class Methodist family. His father Frederick
evidently imposed rigid standards of behavior. The young
Donald loved to play with a beautiful female wax doll, and his
father so teased him about this non-male behavior that the little
boy smashed his beloved toy. If much of his life and thought was
devoted to protection of the “true self” from invasion by the
 introduction to the routledge classics edition xv

forces of conformity, this is surely the outgrowth of his father’s

intrusiveness and the pain it inflicted. In a late essay on the self,
which he describes as “a protest from the core of me,” he
remarks that “[r]ape, and being eaten by cannibals, these are
mere bagatelles as compared with the violation of the self ’s
core.”
Winnicott’s mother Bessie was apparently both depressed
and frightened of her sexuality: Donald once told a close friend
that his mother weaned him early because she disliked the
pleasurable feelings that nursing caused. His efforts to keep his
depressed mother alive involved, he later realized, denying him-
self both aggressive and sexual feelings. Donald chose as his first
wife a mentally disturbed woman, Alice Taylor, who rarely
bathed and who used to commune with the spirit of T. E.
Lawrence through her parrot. The marriage lasted for twenty-six
years but was never consummated. Donald later connected the
ability to enjoy sex fully with the idea of giving oneself permis-
sion to be aggressive. The strain of caring for the increasingly
dotty Alice may be connected with a series of heart attacks that
made his health increasingly fragile.
Meanwhile, after service on a destroyer during the First World
War, Donald took a medical degree at Cambridge and went into
pediatrics. His interest in children had been strong for years. He
writes with delight of their individuality, their powers of
imagination. He once estimated that during his career he had
treated 60,000 children. At the same time, no doubt owing
to his own personal problems, his interest in psychoanalysis
was already strong. He graduated from the British Institute for
Psychoanalysis in 1935; at that point he began analysis with
Kleinian Joan Rivière. Chosen by Klein in 1935 to analyze her
son Eric, Winnicott was drawn deeply into the Kleinian circle,
where he never felt completely at home. He experienced Klein’s
demand for orthodoxy as stifling, and increasingly felt a need to
rebel and go his own way. Meanwhile, he was challenging the
xvi introduction to the routledge classics edition

foundations of her theoretical approach, insisting on the

importance of the real-life mother and living human interaction.
Working with evacuated children during the Second World
War, Donald met social worker Clare Britton; in 1944 the two
began an affair that led, in 1949, to the dissolution of the
marriage to Alice and to a long and happy marriage that lasted
until his death in 1971. Plainly they had a successful sexual
relationship, and they shared a love of humor, music, and poetry.
A friend called them “two crazy people who delighted each
other and delighted their friends.” Asked whether they ever
quarreled, the elderly Clare recalled, “In fact the question of
hurting each other did not arise because we were operating in
the play area where everything is permitted.” Sometimes Donald
would wake up in the night and say, “ ‘I’m potty about you,
do you know that?’ ” Clare, a tough woman who eventually
received the Order of the British Empire for her work with
needy children, seems also to have had a remarkable capacity
for unanxiously “holding” Donald’s mercurial temper, his
vicissitudes, his health difficulties.
On a trip to New York in 1969, Donald suffered a particularly
serious cardiac crisis after the flu. He lived for another year, but
in a weakened condition. He continued to see patients and wrote
papers, broaching significant new areas, such as the importance
of recognizing the mixture of genders in all human beings.
He died in January 1971, after watching an old movie comedy
on TV.

III
While Freud saw human beings as driven by powerful instincts
that need to be tamed if morality and culture are to be possible,
Winnicott had confidence in the unfolding of the develop-
mental process, which would produce ethical concern as an out-
growth of early struggles if things went well enough. He felt that
development usually goes well, and that mothers are usually
 introduction to the routledge classics edition xvii

“good enough.” Mothers are preoccupied with their infants

early on, and attend to their needs well, enabling the self to
develop gradually and to express itself.
At first, the infant cannot grasp the mother as a definite object.
Its world is symbiotic and basically narcissistic. Gradually, how-
ever, the infant develops the capacity to be alone – aided by its
“transitional objects,” a famous phrase invented by Winnicott for
the blankets and stuffed animals that enable children to comfort
themselves when the mother is absent. Eventually the child
develops the ability to “play alone in the presence of its mother,”
a key sign of growing confidence in the developing self. At this
point, the child begins to be able to relate to the mother as a
whole person rather than as an extension of its own needs.
(Winnicott always spoke of mothers, and seems to have had a
blind spot for the role of the father, until close to the end of his
life. At the same time, he did increasingly stress that “mother”
was a role rather than a biological category, that real mothers
had aspects of both genders, and that analysts, biologically male
and female, typically play a quasi-maternal role.)
Winnicott thought that this stage typically led to a painful
emotional crisis: the child now understands that the very
same person whom it loves and embraces is the person against
whom it has directed aggressive and angry wishes. At this point
a “capacity for concern” emerges, as genuinely moral feeling
bootstraps itself into existence out of the child’s very love of
its mother and the awareness that its aggression has projected
harm. Morality thus operates in tandem with love, rather than
being merely a forbidding set of quasi-paternal demands. The
imagination is crucial in coming to grips with this crisis:
through the capacity to imagine the mother’s feelings, a child
becomes capable of generous and reparative acts. In later life,
Winnicott felt, the arts continue to enrich this “potential space”
between people, and thus to enrich, in a wild and indirect way,
the moral life.
xviii introduction to the routledge classics edition

Throughout this development, it is crucial that the family

should provide the child with a “facilitating environment” that
allows it to express itself, including its destructiveness and hate,
without fearing that the mother will thereby be destroyed.
Remarkably, mothers usually accept their children’s hate and are
not destroyed. The process will go awry if the mother is too
fearful or depressed, or if she too rigidly demands conformity
and perfection in herself and in her child.

IV
One might have had these insights without being able to trans-
late them into analytic practice. Winnicott, however, seems to
have had a remarkable capacity for empathy and play as an
analyst, and for creating a “holding environment” in which
patients of a wide range of ages and types could express
aggression without fearing that the analyst would thereby be
destroyed. “I could let my tension go and develop and relax
because you were present in my inner world,” wrote analyst
Harry Guntrip in his notes of his analysis with Winnicott.
The pediatrician first and always, whether with adults or with
children, Winnicott was always willing to play, to respond to the
moment, to surprise, to adopt unconventional methods if they
seemed right. Sometimes he sat on the floor; sometimes he
offered a cup of tea; sometimes he held a hand. Sometimes
sessions were daily, and sometimes months apart. In the case of
“the Piggle,” a little girl who was two and a half when she began
to see Winnicott, and five when she finished, sessions were held
on demand by the child, often months apart, and sometimes
included participation by the parents. Throughout we see his
utter respect for the child’s world of objects. Almost his first
remark, in notes of the first session, is, “Already I had made
friends with the teddy-bear who was sitting on the floor by the
desk.”
 introduction to the routledge classics edition xix

V
The Family and Individual Development collects lectures Winnicott gave
over the years to social workers, midwives, teachers, and other
workers with children. It offers clear informal descriptions of
some of his central ideas while exemplifying the realism and
flexibility that were hallmarks of his practice. Whenever he has
been abstract for a while, he feels the need to return to real cases,
which he describes with ebullient vividness and evident delight
in human variety. Throughout the collection we see, as well, his
deep respect for mothers, whose understanding of their own
children he frequently supports against bureaucracy.
Winnicott made occasional forays into political thought, and
in the present collection we see clearly the way in which he
connected the possibility of democracy with the possibility of
psychic health. To live with others on terms of mutual inter-
dependence and equality, people have to transcend the narciss-
ism in which we all begin life. But then, Winnicott stresses,
societies need to think well about how to create a “facilitating
environment” for the unfolding of such mature personalities.
The most important factor, he insists, is respecting and protect-
ing the ordinary family. The state should understand that
families typically bring up their children better than any other
group could do. Societies should help families when they need
help, and interfere when children are endangered by a deformed
family. On the whole, however, Winnicott seems to think that
the danger of interference is the greater problem, at least in
England during his lifetime, and he repeatedly tells the social
workers to leave well enough alone.
From a contemporary viewpoint, Winnicott’s discussion of
the family has striking lacunae. He seems to assume that mothers
will both be able to stay home with their children and want to
do so – thus neglecting both the aspiration of women to full
political and workplace equality and the economic struggles of
poor families. Had he faced these two issues, he would have had
xx introduction to the routledge classics edition

to think harder about the father’s role, asking whether it is only

the mother who can be expected to have the requisite devotion
to the infant, and, if so, how fathers and employers might sup-
port women in this role better than they have done in the past.
Surely it would be a start if employers would grant generous
maternity leave and if fathers would assume a disproportionate
part of the non-child-care housework during the time of the
mother’s immersion. Perhaps, however, thinking of the fluidity
of gender roles, Winnicott might have concluded that both
parents can share in devotion to the infant and the tasks that
devotion suggests.
As for economic issues, Winnicott seems surprisingly
unconcerned about the ways in which sheer need undermines
the task of raising children. When he speaks of damaged chil-
dren, he is usually thinking about children whose parents are
dead, or absent, or mentally ill. But what if they simply have
to work long hours in monotonous jobs that allow them little
mental and physical freedom? Democracies need to face that
problem, and Winnicott, given his influence, might have prod-
ded them into doing so sooner and better. Perhaps, however, that
was simply not a topic he thought it useful to address before
groups of social workers, who might have despaired of their
own role had they been told that the real problem of the family is
a huge problem of political commitment and financial redistri-
bution. Winnicott always knew to whom he was talking, and he
always kept in focus the immediate practical aims of any such
talk. Readers, having a wide range of political roles to play, as
voters, citizens, and members of families, may ponder the
unasked questions in the framework that his ideas so valuably
provide.
 introduction to the routledge classics edition xxi

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rodman, F. Robert (2003) Winnicott: Life and Work, Cambridge, MA:
Perseus Publishing.
Winnicott, Donald W. (1965) The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating
Environment, London: Hogarth Press; New York: International
Universities Press. Paperback edition, Karnac Books, 1996.
—— (1971) Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock. New York: Methuen,
1982. Paperback edition, Routledge Classics, 1982.
—— (1989) Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis, New York:
Grove Press.
—— (1989) The Piggle, New York: International Universities Press.
Part I
 [1958

1
THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE

Modern views on the emotional

development

INTRODUCTION
A great deal happens in the first year of the life of the human
infant: emotional development starts at the beginning; in a study
of the evolution of the personality and character it is not possible
to ignore the events of the first days and hours (even the last part
of the prenatal life when the infant is post-mature); and even
birth experience may be significant.
The world has kept turning in spite of our ignorance in these
matters simply because there is something about the mother of a
baby, something which makes her particularly suited to the pro-
tection of her infant in this stage of vulnerability, and which
makes her able to contribute positively to the baby’s positive
needs. The mother is able to fulfil this role if she feels secure; if
4 the family and individual development

she feels loved in her relation to the infant’s father and to her
family; and also feels accepted in the widening circles around the
family which constitute society.
If we like, we may continue to leave the task of infant care to the
mother, whose capacity does not rest on knowledge but comes
from a feeling attitude which she acquires as the pregnancy
advances, and which she gradually loses as the infant grows up
out of her. However, there are reasons why we may profit from a
study of what goes on in the early stages of the development of
the infant personality. For instance, as doctors and nurses we may
need to interfere with the infant-mother relationship in order to
deal with the infant’s physical abnormalities, and we ought to
know what we are interfering with. Moreover, the physical study
of infancy has given rich rewards in the past fifty years, and it
might well be that a similar interest in emotional development
would produce rewards even more rich. A third reason would be
that a proportion of mothers and fathers cannot provide good-
enough conditions at the time of the infant’s birth, on account
of social, family, or personal illness, and then doctors and nurses
are expected to be able to understand and to treat, even to pre-
vent; just as they often have power to do in cases of physical
disease. The paediatrician will increasingly need to be as well
orientated on the emotional as he is at the present time on the
physical side of the map of infant growth.
There is yet a fourth reason for the study of early emotional
growth: it is often possible to detect and to diagnose emotional
disorder in infancy, even during the first year of life. Clearly, the
right time for the treatment of such disorder is the time of its
inception, or as near to it as possible. But I will not pursue this
theme at this point.
Nor will I make reference to physical abnormality or physical
ill health; or to mental growth in terms of developmental ten-
dency, affected by hereditary factors. For present purposes the
infant may be assumed to be sound in body and potentially sound
 the first year of life 5

in mind; and what I want to discuss is the meaning of this

potentiality. What is potential at birth, and, of this, what has
become actual at one year? I assume, too, the existence of a
mother, a mother who is healthy enough to behave naturally as a
mother. Owing to the extreme emotional dependence of the
infant, the development or life of an infant cannot be discussed
apart from infant care.
I have set down below a series of statements, each briefly
expanded. These condensed observations will perhaps indicate
to those concerned with the care of the infant the fact that the
emotional development of the first year of life comprises the
foundation of the mental health of the human individual.

INNATE TENDENCY TOWARDS DEVELOPMENT

In psychological matters there is a tendency towards develop-
ment which is innate, and which corresponds to the growth
of the body and the gradual development of functions. Just
as a baby usually sits at about five or six months, and walks
somewhere near the first birthday, and perhaps uses two or three
words at that time, so there is a process of evolution in emotional
development. However, we do not witness this natural growth
unless conditions are good enough, and part of our difficulty is
the description of the good-enough conditions. In what follows
it will be necessary to take for granted the ontogenetic process,
and the neurophysiological basis of behaviour.

DEPENDENCE
The great change that is noticed in the first year of life is in the
direction of independence. Independence is something that is
achieved out of dependence, but it is necessary to add that depend-
ence is achieved out of what might be called double dependence.
At the very beginning there is an absolute dependence on the
6 the family and individual development

physical and emotional environment. In the earliest stage there is

no vestige of an awareness of this dependence, and for this rea-
son the dependence is absolute. Gradually dependence becomes
to some extent known to the infant who, in consequence,
acquires the capacity for letting the environment know when
attention is needed. Clinically there is found a very gradual pro-
gress towards independence, with dependence and even double
dependence always reappearing. The mother is able to adapt her-
self to the varying – and growing – needs of her infant in this as
in other respects. By one year old, the infant has become able to
keep alive the idea of the mother and also of the child care to
which he or she is accustomed, to keep alive this idea for a
certain length of time, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour,
perhaps longer.
What is found at one year, however, is extremely variable,
variable not only from one infant to another but also in any
one infant. The achievement of a degree of independence may
quite normally be lost and regained over and over again, and
often an infant may return to dependence after being markedly
independent at one year.
This journey from double dependence to dependence and
from dependence to independence is something that is not only
an expression of the innate tendency of the infant to grow; this
growth cannot take place unless a very sensitive adaptation is
made by someone to the infant’s needs. It happens that the
infant’s mother is better than anyone else at performing this most
delicate and constant task; she is more suitable than anyone else
because she is the one who is most likely to be quite naturally
and without resentment devoted to this cause.

INTEGRATION
From the beginning it is possible for the observer to see that an
infant is already a human being, a unit. By the age of one year
 the first year of life 7

most infants have in fact achieved the status of an individual. In

other words, the personality has become integrated. This is not
of course true all the time, but at certain moments and over
certain periods and in certain relationships the infant of one year
is a whole person. But integration is not something that can be
taken for granted; it is something that must develop gradually in
every individual infant. It is not a matter simply of neuro-
physiology, since for this process to take place there must be
certain environmental conditions, actually, those which are best
provided by the infant’s own mother.
Integration appears gradually out of a primary unintegrated
state. At the beginning the infant is made up of a number of
motility phases and sensory perceptions. It is almost certain
that rest for the infant means a return to an unintegrated state.
A return to unintegration is not necessarily frightening to
the infant because of a sense of security that is given by the
mother. Sometimes security means simply being held well.
Both physically and in more subtle ways the mother or the
environment holds the infant together, and unintegration can
take place along with reintegration without the development of
anxiety.
Integration appears to be linked with the more definite
emotional or affective experiences, such as rage, or the excite-
ment of a feeding situation. Gradually, as integration becomes
a settled fact and the infant becomes more and more knit
together into a unit, so does the undoing of what has been gained
become disintegration rather than unintegration. Disintegration
is painful.
The degree to which integration has taken place at one year
is variable: some infants at this age are already in possession of
a strong personality, a self with the personal characteristics
exaggerated; others, at the other extreme, have not by the first
birthday acquired so definite a personality, and are very much
dependent on continuous care.
8 the family and individual development

PERSONALIZATION
The infant at one year is firmly living in the body. The psyche
and the soma have come to terms with each other. The neurolo-
gist would say that body-tone is satisfactory, and would describe
the infant’s coordination as good. This state of affairs, in which
the psyche and the soma are intimately related to each other,
develops out of the initial stages in which the immature psyche
(although based on body functioning) is not closely bound to
the body and to the life of the body. When a reasonable degree
of adaptation to the needs of the infant is provided, this gives the
best possible chance for an early establishment of a firm relation-
ship between the psyche and the soma. Where there is a failure
of adaptation, so there is a tendency for the psyche to develop an
existence that is only loosely related to bodily experience, the
result being that physical frustrations are not always felt with full
intensity.
Even in health, the infant of one year is firmly rooted to the
body only at certain times. The psyche of a normal infant may
lose touch with the body, and there may be phases in which it is
not easy for the infant to come suddenly back into the body, for
instance, when waking from deep sleep. Mothers know this, and
they gradually wake an infant before lifting him or her, so as
not to cause the tremendous screaming of panic which can be
brought about by a change of position of the body at a time
when the psyche is absent from it. Associated clinically with this
absence of the psyche there may be phases of pallor, times when
the infant is sweating and perhaps very cold, and there may
be vomiting. At this stage the mother can think her infant is
dying, but by the time the doctor has arrived there has been
so complete a return to normal health that the doctor is unable
to understand why the mother was alarmed. Naturally, the
general practitioner knows more about this syndrome than the
consultant.
 the first year of life 9

MIND AND PSYCHE-SOMA

By the age of one year the infant has quite clearly developed the
beginnings of a mind. Mind means something quite distinct
from psyche. The psyche is related to the soma and to body
functioning, but the mind depends on the existence and func-
tioning of those parts of the brain that are developed at a later
stage (in phylogenesis) than the parts that are concerned with
the primitive psyche. (It is the mind which gradually makes it
possible for the infant to wait for the feed because of the noises
that indicate that a feed will be forthcoming. This is a crude
example of the use of the mind.)
It could be said that at the beginning the mother must adapt
almost exactly to the infant’s needs in order that the infant per-
sonality shall develop without distortion. She is able to fail in her
adaptation, however, and to fail increasingly, and this is because
the infant’s mind and the infant’s intellectual processes are able
to account for and so to allow for failures of adaptation. In this
way the mind is allied to the mother and takes over part of her
function. In the care of an infant the mother is dependent on the
infant’s intellectual processes, and it is these that enable her
gradually to re-acquire a life of her own.
There are, of course, other ways in which the mind develops.
It is a function of mind to catalogue events, and to store up
memories and classify them. Because of the mind the infant is
able to make use of time as a measurement and also to measure
space. The mind also relates cause and effect.
It would be instructive to compare conditioning in relation to
the mind and to the psyche, and such a study might throw light
on the differences between these two phenomena which are so
regularly confused the one with the other.
Obviously there is a very great variation from one infant to
another in the capacity of the mind to help the mother in her
management. Most mothers are able to adapt to each infant’s
10 the family and individual development

good or poor mental capacity, to go as fast or as slow as the

infant. It is only too easy, however, for a quick mother to get out
of step with one of her children who happens to be limited in
intellectual capacity; and the quick child is also liable to be out of
touch with a slow mother.
At a certain age the child becomes able to allow for the
mother’s characteristics, and so to be relatively independent of
her incapacity to adapt to her infant’s needs, but perhaps not
before the first birthday.

FANTASY AND IMAGINATION

Characteristic of the human infant is fantasy, which may be
thought of as the imaginative elaboration of physical function.
Fantasy rapidly becomes infinitely complex, but at the start it is
presumably restricted in quantity. By direct observation it is not
possible to assess the fantasy of a small infant, but play of any
kind indicates the existence of fantasy.
It is convenient to trace the development of fantasy by making
an artificial classification:

(i) Simple elaboration of function.

(ii) Separation out into: anticipation, experience, and memory.
(iii)Experience in terms of the memory of experience.
(iv) Localization of fantasy within or without the self, with inter-
change and constant enrichment of each from the other.
(v) Construction of a personal or inner world, with sense of
responsibility for what exists and what goes on there.
(vi) Separation out of consciousness from that which is uncon-
scious. The unconscious includes aspects of the psyche
which are so primitive that they never become conscious,
and also aspects of the psyche or of the mental function-
ing which become inaccessible in defence against anxiety
(called the repressed unconscious).
 the first year of life 11

There is a considerable degree of evolution of fantasy within

the first year. It is important to remember that although this (as
all other growth) takes place as a part of the natural tendency
towards growth, evolution is stunted or distorted except under
certain conditions. The nature of these conditions can be studied,
and even stated.

PERSONAL (INNER) REALITY

The inner world of the individual has become a definite organ-
ization by the end of the first year. Positive elements are derived
from the patterns of personal experience, especially of instinctual
experience, interpreted in a personal way, and ultimately based
on the individual’s inborn inherited characteristics (in so far as
they have appeared at this early date). This sample of the world
that is personal to the infant is becoming organized according to
complex mechanisms which have as their purpose:

(i) the preservation of what is felt to be ‘good’ – that is to say,

acceptable and strengthening to the self (ego);
(ii) the isolation of what is felt to be ‘bad’ – that is to say,
unacceptable, persecutory, or injected from external reality
without acceptance (trauma);
(iii) the preservation of an area in the personal psychic reality in
which objects have living interrelationships, exciting, and
even aggressive, as well as affectionate.

By the end of the first year there are even the beginnings of
secondary defences which deal with the breakdown of the pri-
mary organization; for instance, a general damping down of all
inner life, with clinical manifestation in the depressed mood; or
a massive projection into external reality of inner world elements,
with clinical manifestation in an attitude towards the world that
is tinged with paranoia. A very common clinical manifestation of
12 the family and individual development

the latter would be food fads – for example, suspicion of skin

on milk.
The infant’s view of the world external to the self is largely
based on the pattern of the personal inner reality, and it should
be noted that the actual behaviour of the environment towards
an infant is to some extent affected by the infant’s positive and
negative expectations.

INSTINCTUAL LIFE
At first the instinctual life of the infant is based on the alimentary
functioning. Hand and mouth interests predominate, but grad-
ually excretory functions make their contribution. At a certain
age, perhaps five months, the infant begins to be able to connect
excreting with feeding, and faeces and urine with oral intake.
Along with this comes the beginning of the acquisition of a
personal inner world, which therefore tends to be localized
in the belly. From this simple pattern there is a spreading out
of psyche-soma experience to include the whole of the body
functioning.
Breathing gets caught up in whatever predominates at the
time, so that it may be associated now with intake and now with
output. An important characteristic of breathing is that, except
during crying, it lays bare a continuity of inner and outer, that is
to say, a failure of defences.
All functions tend to have an orgastic quality in that they
each in their own way contain a phase of local excitement and
preparation, a climax with general bodily involvement, and a
period of aftermath.
The anal function acquires more and more importance, so
that it may predominate over oral function. The orgasm of
excretion is normally an excretory orgasm, but in certain cir-
cumstances the anus may become an accepting organ, and gather
to itself some of the importance of oral function and intake.
 the first year of life 13

Naturally, anal manipulations increase the likelihood of such a

complication.
In both male and female infants urinary excretion is liable
to be orgastic, and correspondingly exciting and satisfactory.
Orgastic satisfaction, however, depends to a considerable extent
on correct timing. Efforts to train infants in regard to their
excretory processes, if successful, rob the infant of the physical
satisfactions that belong to the era of infancy, and the con-
sequences of training instituted too early are immense, often
disastrous.
Genital excitement is not of prime importance during the first
year of life. Nevertheless, in boys there may be erection and in
girls vaginal activities, both occurring mainly in association with
excited feeding or with the idea of feeding. Vaginal activities are
liable to be roused by anal manipulations. Phallic erection
begins, in the first year, to have an importance of its own, and
clitoris excitement has a corresponding position. By the first
birthday, however, it is not usual for the girl baby to have begun
to envy the boy his genital, an organ which (as compared with
the clitoris or the vulva) is obvious when at rest and still more
obvious when roused. This discrepancy will tend to give rise to
swank and envy in the next year or two. (Genital function and
fantasy do not reach the position of dominance over the ingest-
ive and excretory functions until the period roughly outlined by
the ages of two to five.)
During the first year the instinctual experiences carry the
infant’s rapidly growing capacity for relating to objects, a capacity
which culminates in a love relationship as between two whole
persons, baby and mother. The triangular relationship, with its
specific enrichment and complications, is becoming a new fac-
tor in the infant’s life at about the time of the first birthday, but it
does not reach its full status until the child is of toddler age, and
until the time of dominance of the genital over the various types
of alimentary instinctual functioning and fantasy.
14 the family and individual development

The reader will easily recognize in this account Freud’s theory

of infantile sexuality, which was the first contribution from
psycho-analysis to the understanding of the emotional life of
infants. The whole idea of an instinctual life in infancy roused
an immense reaction in public feeling, but it is now generally
recognized that this theory is the central theme in the psychol-
ogy of normal infancy as well as in the study of the roots of
psychoneurosis.

OBJECT RELATIONSHIPS
The infant at one year is at times a whole person related to whole
persons. This achievement has developed gradually, and only
becomes a fact when conditions are sufficiently good.
The early state is a relationship to part-objects – for instance,
the baby related to a breast, the mother not being a feature
even although the baby may ‘know’ the mother at moments of
affectionate contact. It is the gradual integration of the infant’s
personality into a unit that makes it possible for the part-object
(breast, etc.) to be felt by the infant to be part of a whole person,
and this aspect of development brings in its train specific anx-
ieties. These will be referred to under capacity for concern (p. 17
below).
Along with the recognition of the whole object comes the
beginning of a sense of dependence, and therefore the begin-
ning of the need for independence. Also, the perception of the
dependability of the mother makes possible the existence of the
quality of dependability in the infant.
At an earlier stage, before the infant operates as a unit, object
relationships are of the nature of a union of part with part. There
is an extreme degree of variability in respect of the existence at
any one stage of a whole self which is available for experiencing,
and for retaining the memory of experiences.
 the first year of life 15

SPONTANEITY
Instinctual impulse creates a situation which either proceeds
to satisfaction, or else fizzles out in a diffuse dissatisfaction or
general discomfort of both psyche and soma. There is a time
for the satisfaction of an impulse, a climax to be matched with
actual experience. Satisfactions are of immense importance to
the infant in the first year of life, and it is only gradually that each
infant becomes able to allow for being kept waiting. What is
asked, of course, is that the infant shall give up spontaneity in
favour of compliance with the needs of those who are caring
for the infant. We sometimes ask of infants more than we can
achieve ourselves.
Spontaneity is thus threatened by two sets of factors:

(i) by the mother’s wish to free herself from the bondage of

motherhood, and this may be overlaid by the mother’s
mistaken idea that she must train her infant early in order
to produce a ‘good’ child;
(ii) by the development by complex mechanisms of a restriction
of spontaneity from within the infant (the establishment of
a superego).

It is this development of control from within that forms the

only true basis for morality, and morality starts even in this first
year of the individual’s life. It starts as a result of crude fears of
retaliation, and continues as a curbing of the instinctual life of
the infant (who is becoming established as a person with a sense
of concern); it protects the objects of love from the full blast of
primitive love, primitive love being ruthless and aiming only at
satisfaction of instinctual impulse.
At first the mechanics of self-control are crude like the
impulses themselves, and the strictness of the mother helps by
being less brutal and more human; for a mother can be defied,
16 the family and individual development

but the inhibition of an impulse from within is liable to be

total. The strictness of mothers has an unexpected significance,
therefore, in that it produces compliance gently and gradually,
and saves the infant from the fierceness of self-control. By
natural evolution, if the external conditions remain favourable,
the infant sets up a ‘human’ internal strictness, and so manages
self-control without too great a loss of that spontaneity which
alone makes life worth living.

CREATIVE CAPACITY
The subject of spontaneity leads on naturally to the subject of the
creative impulse, that which (as nothing else) proves to the child
that he or she is alive.
The innate creative impulse withers unless it is met by
external reality (‘realized’). Each infant must re-create the world,
but this is only possible if, bit by bit, the world arrives at the
moments of the infant’s creative activity. The infant reaches out
and the breast is there, and the breast is created. The success of
this operation depends on the sensitive adaptation the mother is
making to her infant’s needs, especially at the beginning.
From this there is a natural progression to the individual
infant’s creation of the whole world of external reality, and to
the continuous creating which at first needs an audience and
which then eventually creates even the audience. The painful
early stages of this life process belong to early infancy, and to the
mother’s capacity to produce the reality sample at more or less
the right moment. She can do this because she is identified with
her infant, temporarily, to an extreme degree.

MOTILITY – AGGRESSION
Motility is a feature of the live foetus, and the movements of a
premature infant in an incubator presumably give a picture of
 the first year of life 17

the infant in the womb near term. Motility is the precursor of

aggression, which is a term that develops meaning as the infant
grows. A special instance of aggression appears in the hand-
grasp and in chewing activities which later become biting. In
health a large proportion of the aggressive potential becomes
fused in with the infant’s instinctual experiences, and with the
pattern of the individual infant’s relationships. Good-enough
environmental conditions are necessary for this development to
take place.
In ill health only a small proportion of the aggressive potential
becomes fused in with the erotic life, and the infant is then
burdened with impulses that make no sense. These eventually
lead to destructiveness in the relationship to objects, or, worse,
form the basis of activity that is entirely senseless, as, for
instance, a convulsion. There is a liability for this unfused aggres-
sion to appear in the form of an expectation or attack. This is one
way in which there may be a pathology of emotional develop-
ment, evident from a very early stage, and eventually showing
as a psychiatric disorder. Such a disorder may, obviously, have
paranoid features.
The aggressive potential is extremely variable because it
depends not only on innate factors but also on the chance of
environmental mishap; for instance, certain kinds of difficult
birth can profoundly affect the state of the infant that is just
born; and even being born normally may perhaps have some
features that are traumatic for the infant’s immature psyche,
which knows no other defence except that of reacting, and so
temporarily ceasing to exist in its own right.

CAPACITY FOR CONCERN

Somewhere in the second half of the first year of the normal
infant’s life there appears evidence of a capacity to be concerned,
or an ability to experience guilt feeling. Here is a highly complex
18 the family and individual development

state of affairs, one that depends on the integration of the

infant personality into a unit, and on the infant’s acceptance
of responsibility for the total fantasy of what belongs to the
instinctual moment. For this highly sophisticated achievement
the continued presence of the mother (or her substitute) is a
necessary precondition, and the attitude of the mother must
contain the element of being ready to see and accept the infant’s
immature efforts to contribute, that is to say, to repair, to love
constructively. This important stage in the emotional develop-
ment has been studied in great detail by Melanie Klein, in her
extension of psycho-analytic (Freudian) theory to cover the
origins of the personal guilt sense, and of the urge to act in a
constructive way, and to give. In this way potency (and the
acceptance of potency) has one of its roots in the emotional
development that takes place before (as well as after) the first
birthday.

POSSESSIONS
By the age of one year, infants have usually acquired one or
several soft objects, teddies, rag dolls, etc., which are important
to them. (Some boys prefer hard objects.) Obviously these
objects stand for part-objects, notably for the breast, and only
gradually do they stand for babies and for mother or father.
It is very interesting to study the infant’s use of the very first
object adopted, perhaps a bit of wool from a blanket, or a nap-
kin, or a silk scarf. This object can become vitally important, and
can have value as an object intermediate between the self and the
outside world. Typically a child can be seen going to sleep
clutching such an object (called by me a ‘transitional object’),
and at the same time sucking two fingers or a thumb, and per-
haps stroking the upper lip or the nose. The pattern is personal
to the child, and this pattern, which appears at the time of going
to sleep, or at times of loneliness, sadness, anxiety, may persist to
 the first year of life 19

late childhood or even to adult life. This is all part of normal

emotional development.
These phenomena (that I call transitional) appear to form the
basis of the whole cultural life of the adult human being.
Severe deprivation may lead to a loss of the capacity to use the
well-tried technique, with resulting restlessness and sleepless-
ness. Clearly the thumb in the mouth and the rag doll in the
hand simultaneously symbolize a part of the self and a part of the
environment.
Here is an opportunity for the observer to study the origins of
affectionate behaviour, which is important (if for no other rea-
son) because the loss of the capacity to be affectionate is a charac-
teristic of the older ‘deprived child’, who clinically displays an
antisocial tendency and is a candidate for delinquency.

LOVE
As the infant grows, the meaning of the word ‘love’ alters, or the
meaning gathers to itself new elements:

(i) Love means existing, breathing, and being alive, to be

loved.
(ii) Love means appetite. Here is no concern, only need for
satisfaction.
(iii) Love means affectionate contact with the mother.
(iv) Love means integration (on the part of the infant) of the
object of instinctual experience with the whole mother of
affectionate contact; giving becomes related to taking, etc.
(v) Love means staking a claim on the mother, being greedy
under compulsion, forcing the mother to make up for the
(inevitable) deprivations for which she is responsible.
(vi) Love means caring for the mother (or substitute object) as
the mother cared for the infant – a preview of an adult
attitude of responsibility.
20 the family and individual development

CONCLUSION
These developments (and many others) can be seen in the first
year, though of course nothing is established at the first birthday,
and almost all can be lost by a breakdown of environmental
provision after that date, or even through anxieties that are
inherent in emotional maturation.
The paediatrician may well feel appalled when he attempts
to master the psychology of the infant, briefly sketched here.
Nevertheless he need not despair, for he can usually leave it all to
the infant, the mother, and the father. But if he must interfere
with the infant-mother relationship let him at least know what
he is doing, and let him avoid all interference that is avoidable.
References

INTRODUCTION TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS

EDITION

Rodman, F. Robert (2003) Winnicott: Life and Work,

Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Winnicott, Donald W. (1965) The Maturational Processes and

the Facilitating Environment, London: Hogarth Press; New
York: International Universities Press. Paperback edition,
Karnac Books, 1996.

—— (1971) Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock. New York:

Methuen, 1982. Paperback edition, Routledge Classics, 1982.

—— (1989) Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an

Analysis, New York: Grove Press.

—— (1989) The Piggle, New York: International Universities

Press.