Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 26:137-143 (IJP)
Primitive Emotional Development1
D. W. Winnicott
It will be clear at once from my title that I have chosen a very wide subject.
All I can attempt to do is to make a preliminary personal statement, as if
writing the introductory chapter to a book.
I shall not first give a historical survey and show the development of my ideas
from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What
happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle down to clinical
experience, form my own theories and then last of all interest myself in looking
to see where I stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any.
About primitive emotional development there is a great deal that is not known or
properly understood, at least by me, and it could well be argued that this
discussion ought to be postponed 5 or 10 years. Against this there is the fact
that misunderstandings constantly recur in the Society's scientific meetings,
and perhaps we shall find we do know enough already to prevent some of these
misunderstandings by a discussion of these primitive emotional states.
Primarily interested in the child patient, and the infant, I decided that I must
study psychosis in analysis. I have had about a dozen psychotic adult patients,
and half of these have been rather extensively analysed. This happened in the
war, and I might say that I hardly noticed the blitz, being all the time engaged
in analysis of patients who are notoriously and maddeningly oblivious of bombs,
earthquakes and floods.
As a result of this work I have a great deal to communicate and to bring into
alignment with current theories, and perhaps this paper may be taken as a
beginning.
By listening to what I have to say, and criticizing, you help me to take my next
step, which is the study of the sources of my ideas, both in clinical work and
in the published writings of analysts. It has in fact been extremely difficult
to keep clinical material out of this paper, which I wished nevertheless to keep
short so that there might be plenty of time for discussion.
The following is my highly condensed personal statement.
I
First I must prepare the way. Let me try to describe different types of
psycho-analysis. It is possible to do the analysis of a suitable patient taking
into account almost exclusively that person's personal relation to people, along
with the conscious and unconscious phantasies that enrich and complicate these
relationships between whole persons. This is the original type of
psycho-analysis. In the last two decades we have been shown how to develop our
interest in phantasy, and how the patient's own phantasy about his inner
organization and its origin in instinctual experience is important as such.2We have been shown further that in certain cases it is this, the patient's
phantasy about his inner organization,
My especial thanks are due to Dr. W. Clifford M. Scott for his help both in the
work on which this paper is based and in the preparation of the paper itself.
1 Read before the British Psycho-Analytical Society, November 28, 1945.
2 Chiefly through the work of Melanie Klein.
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that is vitally important, so that the analysis of depression and the
defences against depression cannot be done on the basis only of consideration of
the patient's relations to real people and his phantasies about them. This new
emphasis on the patient's phantasy of himself opened up the wide field of
analysis of hypochondria in which the patient's phantasy about his inner world
includes the phantasy that this is localized inside his own body. It became
possible for us to relate, in analysis, the qualitative changes in the
individual's inner world to his instinctual experiences. The quality of these
instinctual experiences accounted for the good and bad nature, as well as the
existence, of what is inside.
This work was a natural progression of psycho-analysis; it involved new
understanding but not new technique. It quickly led to the study and analysis of
still more primitive relationships, and it is these that I wish to discuss in
this paper. The existence of still more primitive object relationships has never
been in doubt.
I have said that no modification in Freud's technique was needed for the
extension of analysis to cope with depression and hypochondria. It is also true,
according to my experience, that the same technique can take us to still more
primitive elements, provided of course that we take into consideration the
changes in the transference situation inherent in such work.
I mean by this that a patient needing analysis of ambivalence in external
relationships has a different phantasy of his analyst and the analyst's work
from the one who is depressed. In the former case the analyst's work is thought
of as done out of love for the patient, hate being deflected on to hateful
things. The depressed patient requires of his analyst the understanding that the
analyst's work is to some extent his effort to cope with his own (the analyst's)
depression, or shall I say guilt and grief resultant from the destructive
elements in his own (the analyst's) love. To progress further along these lines,
the patient who is asking for help in regard to his primitive, pre-depressive
relationship to objects needs his analyst to be able to see the analyst's
undisplaced and co-incident love and hate of him. In such cases the end of the
hour, the end of the analysis, the rules and regulations, these all come in as
important expressions of hate, just as the good interpretations are expressions
of love, and symbolical of good food and care. This theme could be developed
extensively and usefully.
II
Before embarking directly on a description of primitive emotional development I
should also like to make it clear that the analysis of these primitive
relationships cannot be undertaken except as an extension of the analysis of
depression. It is certain that these primitive types of relationship in so far
as they appear in children and adults come as a flight from the difficulties
arising out of the next stages, after the classical conception of regression. It
is right for a student analyst to learn first to cope with ambivalence in
external relationships and with simple repression and then to progress to the
analysis of the patient's phantasy about the inside and outside of his
personality, and the whole range of his defences against depression, including
the origins of the persecutory elements. These latter things the analyst can
surely find in any analysis, but it would be useless or harmful for him to cope
with principally depressive relationships unless he was fully prepared to
analyse straightforward ambivalence. It is at least as true that it is useless
and even dangerous to analyse the primitive pre-depressive relationships, and to
interpret them as they appear in the transference, unless the analyst is fully
prepared to cope with the depressive position, the defences against depression,
and the persecutory ideas which appear for interpretation as the patient
progresses.
III
I have more preparatory remarks to make. It has often been noted that, at five
to six months, a change occurs in infants which makes it more easy than before
for us to refer to their emotional development in the terms that apply to human
beings generally. Anna Freud makes rather a special point of this and implies
that in her view the tiny infant is concerned more with certain care-aspects
than with specific people. Bowlby recently expressed the view that infants
before six months are not particular, so that separation from their mother does
not affect them in the same way as it does after six months. I myself have
previously stated that infants reach something at six months, so that whereas
many five months' infants grasp an object and put it to the mouth, it is not
till six months that the average infant starts to follow this up by deliberately
dropping the object as part of his play with it.
In specifying five to six months we need not try to be too accurate. If in a
certain case a baby of three or even two months or even less reaches the stage
of development that it is convenient in general description to place at five
months, no harm will be done.
In my opinion the stage we are describing, and I think one may accept this
description, is a very important one. To some extent it is an affair of physical
development, for the infant at five months becomes skilled to the extent that he
grasps an object he sees, and can soon get it to his mouth. He could not have
done this earlier. (Of course he may have wanted to. There is no exact parallel
between skill and wish, and we know that many physical advances, such as the
ability to walk, are often held up till emotional development releases physical
attainment. Whatever the physical side of the matter, there is also the
emotional.) We
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can say that at this stage a baby becomes able in his play to show that he
can understand he has an inside, and that things come from outside. He shows he
knows that he is enriched by what he incorporates (physically and psychically).
Further, he shows that he knows he can get rid of something when he has got from
it what he wants from it. All this represents a tremendous advance. It is at
first only reached from time to time, and every detail of this advance can be
lost as a regression because of anxiety.
The corollary of this is that now the infant assumes that his mother also has an
inside, one which may be rich or poor, good or bad, ordered or muddled. He is
therefore starting to be concerned with the mother and her sanity and her moods.
In the case of many infants there is a relationship as between whole persons at
six months. Now when a human being feels he is a person related to people, he
has already travelled a long way in primitive development.
Our task is to examine what goes on in the infant's feelings and personality
before this stage which we recognize at five to six months, but which may be
reached later or earlier.