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.
There is also this question: how early do important things happen? For instance,
does the unborn child have to be considered? And if so, at what age after
conception does psychology come in? I would answer that if there is an important
stage at five to six months there is also an important stage round about birth.
My reason for saying this is the great differences that can be noticed if the
baby is pre-mature or post-mature. I suggest that at the end of nine months'
gestation an infant becomes ripe for emotional development, and that if an
infant is post-mature he has reached this stage in the womb and one is therefore
forced to consider his feelings before and during birth. On the other hand a
premature infant is not experiencing much that is vital till he has reached the
age at which he should have been born, that is to say some weeks after birth. At
any rate this forms a basis for discussion.
Another question is: psychologically speaking, does anything matter before five
to six months? I know that the view is quite sincerely held in some quarters
that the answer is 'no'. This view must be given its due, but it is not mine.
The main object of this paper is to present the thesis that the early emotional
development of the infant, before the infant knows himself (and therefore
others) as the whole person he is (and they are), is vitally important: indeed
that here are the clues to the psychopathology of psychoses.
IV
PRIMARY PROCESSES
There are three processes which seem to me to start very early: (1) integration,
(2) personalization, and (3), following these, the appreciation of time and
space and other properties of reality-in short, realization.
A great deal that we tend to take for granted had a beginning and a condition
out of which it developed. For instance, many analyses sail through to
completion without time being ever in dispute. But a boy of nine who loved to
play with Ann, aged two, was acutely interested in the expected new baby. He
said: 'When the new baby's born will he be born before Ann?' For him time-sense
is very shaky. Again, a psychotic patient could not adopt any routine because if
she did she had no idea on a Tuesday whether it was last week, or this week, or
next week.
The localization of self in one's own body is often assumed, yet a psychotic
patient in analysis came to recognize that as a baby she thought her twin at the
other end of the pram was herself. She even felt surprised when her twin was
picked up and yet she remained where she was. Her sense of self and
other-than-self was undeveloped.
Another psychotic patient discovered in analysis that most of the time she lived
in her head, behind her eyes. She could only see out of her eyes as out of
windows and so was not aware of what her feet were doing, and in consequence she
tended to fall into pits and to trip over things. She had no 'eyes in her feet'.
Her personality was not felt to be localized in her body, which was like a
complex engine that she had to drive with conscious care and skill. Another
patient, at times, lived in a box 20 yards up, only connected with her body by a
slender thread. In all practices examples of these failures in primitive
development occur daily, and by them we may be reminded of the importance of
such processes as integration, personalization and relization.
It may be assumed that at the theoretical start the personality is unintegrated,
and that in regressive disintegration there is a primary state to which
regression leads. We postulate a primary unintegration.
Disintegration of personality is a well-known psychiatric condition, and its
psychopathology is highly complex. Examination of these phenomena in analysis,
however, shows that the primary unintegrated state provides a basis for
disintegration, and that delay or failure in respect of primary integration
predisposes to disintegration as a regression, or result of failure in other
types of denfence.
In any case, integration starts right away at the beginning of life, and in our
work we can never take it for granted. We have to account for it and watch its
fluctuations.
An example of unintegration phenomena is provided by the very common experience
of the patient who proceeds to give every detail of the week-end and feels
contented at the end if everything has been said, though the analyst feels that
no analytic work has been done. Sometimes we
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The tendency to integrate is helped by two sets of experience: the technique of
infant-care whereby an infant is kept warm, handled and bathed and rocked and
named, and also the acute instinctual experiences which tend to gather the
personality together from within. Many infants are well on the way toward
integration during certain periods of the first 24 hours of life. In others the
process is delayed or set-backs occur because of early inhibition of making
greedy attacks. There are long stretches of time in a normal infant's life in
which a baby does not mind whether he is many bits or one whole being, or
whether he lives in his mother's face or in his own body, provided that from
time to time he comes together and feels something. Later I will try to explain
why disintegration is frightening, whereas unintegration is not.
In regard to environment, bits of nursing technique, faces seen and sounds
heard, and smells smelt are only gradually pieced together into one being to be
called mother. In the transference situation in analysis of psychotics we get
the clearest proof that the psychotic states of unintegration had a natural
place at a sufficiently primitive stage of the emotional development of the
individual.
It is sometimes assumed that in health the individual is always integrated, as
well as living in his own body, and able to feel that the world is real. There
is, however, much sanity that has a symptomatic quality, being charged with fear
or denial of madness, fear or denial of the innate capacity of every human being
to become unintegrated, depersonalized, and to feel that the world is unreal.
Sufficient lack of sleep produces these conditions in anyone.3
Equally important with integration is the development of the feeling that one's
person is in one's body. Again it is instinctual experience and repeated quiet
experiences of body-care that gradually build up what may be called satisfactory
personalization. And as with disintegration so also the depersonalization
phenomena of psychosis relate to early personalization delays.
Depersonalization is a common thing in adults and in children, it is often
hidden for instance in what is called deep sleep and in prostration attacks with
corpse-like pallor:?She's miles away, ' people say, and they're right.
A problem related to that of personalization is that of the imaginary companions
of childhood. These are not simple phantasy constructions. Study of the future
of these imaginary companions (in analysis) shows that they are sometimes other
selves of a highly primitive type. I cannot here formulate a clear statement of
what I mean, and it would be out of place for me to explain this detail at
length now. I would say, however, that this very primitive and magical creation
of imaginary companions is easily used as a defence, as it magically by-passes
all the anxieties associated with incorporation, digestion, retention and
expulsion.
V
DISSOCIATION
Out of the problem of unintegration comes another, that of dissociation.
Dissociation can usefully be studied in its initial or natural forms. According
to my view there grows out of unintegration a series of what are then called
dissociations, which arise owing to integration being incomplete or partial.
Take the quiet and the excited states. I think an infant cannot be said to be
aware at the start that while feeling this and that in his cot or enjoying the
skin stimulations of bathing, he is the same as himself screaming for immediate
satisfaction, possessed by an urge to get at and destroy something unless
satisfied by milk. This means that he does not know at first that the mother he
is building up through his quiet experiences is the same as the power behind the
breasts that he has in his mind to destroy.
Also I think there is not necessarily an integration between a child asleep and
a child awake. This integration comes in the course of time. Once day-dreams are
remembered and even conveyed somehow to a third person, the dissociation is
broken down a little; but some people never clearly remember their dreams, and
children depend very much on adults for getting to know their dreams. It is
normal for small children to have anxiety dreams and terrors. At these times
children need someone to help them to remember what they dreamed. It is a
valuable experience whenever a dream is both dreamed and remembered, precisely
because of the breakdown of dissociation that this represents. However complex
such a dissociation may be in child or adult, the fact remains that it can start
in the natural alternation of the sleeping and awake states, dating from birth.
In fact the waking life of an infant can be perhaps described as a gradually
developing dissociation from the sleeping state.
Artistic creation gradually takes the place of dreams or supplements them, and
is vitally important
3Through artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive
selves. It is from here that the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute
sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane.
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for the welfare of the individuals and therefore for mankind.
Dissociation is an extremely widespread defence mechanism, and leads to
surprising results. For instance urban life is a dissociation, a serious one for
civilization. Also war and peace. The extremes in mental illness are well known.
In childhood dissociation appears for instance in such common conditions as
somnambulism, incontinence of faces, in some forms of squinting, etc. It is very
easy to miss dissociation when assessing a personality.
VI
REALITY ADAPTATION
Let us now assume integration. If we do, we reach another enormous subject, the
primary relation to external reality. In ordinary analyses we can and do take
for granted this step in emotional development, which is highly complex and
which, when it is made, represents a big advance in emotional development, yet
is never finally made and settled. Many cases that we consider unsuitable for
analysis are unsuitable indeed if we cannot deal with the transference
difficulties that belong to an essential lack of true relation to external
reality. If we allow analysis of psychotics we find that in some analyses this
essential lack of true relation to external reality is almost the whole thing.
I will try to describe in the simplest possible terms this phenomenon as I see
it. In terms of baby and mother's breast (I am not claiming that the breast is
essential as a vehicle of mother-love) the baby has instinctual urges and
predatory ideas. The mother has a breast and the power to produce milk, and the
idea that she would like to be attacked by a hungry baby. These two phenomena do
not come into relation with each other till the mother and child live an
experience together. The mother being mature and physically able has to be the
one with tolerance and understanding, so that it is she that produces a
situation which may with luck result in the first tie the infant makes with an
external object, that is external to self from the infant's point of view.
I think of the process as if two lines came from opposite directions, liable to
come near each other. If they overlap there is a moment of illusion-a bit of
experience which the infant can take as either his hallucination or a thing
belonging to external reality.
In other language, the infant comes to the breast when excited, and ready to
hallucinate something fit to be attacked. At that moment the actual nipple
appears and he is able to feel it was that nipple that he hallucinated. So his
ideas are enriched by actual details of sight, feel, smell, and next time this
material is used in the hallucination. In this way he starts to build up a
capacity to conjure up what is actually available. The mother has to go on
giving the infant this type of experience. The process is immensely simplified
if the infant is cared for by one person and one technique. It seems as if an
infant is really designed to be cared for from birth by his own mother, or
failing that by an adopted mother, and not by several nurses.
It is especially at the start that mothers are vitally important, and indeed it
is a mother's job to protect her infant from complications that cannot yet be
understood by the infant, and to go on steadily providing the simplified bit of
the world which the infant, through her, comes to know. Only on such a
foundation can objectivity be built, or a scientific attitude. All failure in
objectivity at whatever date relates to failure in this stage of primitive
emotional development. Only on a basis of monotony can a mother profitably add
richness.
One thing that follows the acceptance of external reality is the advantage to be
gained from it. We often hear of the very real frustrations imposed by external
reality, but less often hear of the relief and satisfaction it affords. Real
milk is satisfying as compared with imaginary milk, but this is not the point.
The point is that in phantasy things work by magic: there are no brakes on
magic, and love and hate cause alarming effects. External reality has brakes on
it, and can be studied and known, and, in fact, phantasy is only tolerable at
full blast when objective reality is appreciated well. The subjective has
tremendous value but is so alarming and magical that it cannot be enjoyed except
as a parallel to the objective.
It will be seen that phantasy is not something the individual creates to deal
with external reality's frustrations. This is only true of phantasying. Phantasy
has more title to the word primary than has realization, and its enrichment with
the world's riches depends on the moments of illusion that I have described.
It is interesting to examine the individual's relation to the objects in the
self-created world of phantasy. In fact there are all grades of development and
sophistication in this self-created world according to the amount of illusion
that has been experienced, and so according to how much the self-created world
has been unable or able to use perceived external world objects as material.
This obviously needs a much more lengthy statement in another setting.
In the most primitive state, which may be retained in illness, and to which
regression may occur, the object behaves according to magical laws, i.e. it
exists when desired, it approaches when approached, it hurts when hurt. Lastly
it vanishes when not wanted.
This last is most terrifying, and is the only true annihilation. To not want,
perhaps as a result of satisfaction, is to annihilate the object. This is one
reason why infants are not always happy and
4 I will just mention another reason why an infant is not satisfied with
satisfaction. He feels fobbed off. He intended, one might say, to make a
cannibalistic attack and he has been put off by an opiate, the feed. At best he
can postpone the attack.
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I realize that this is only the bare outline of the vast problem of the initial
steps in the development of a relation to external reality, and the relation of
phantasy to reality. Soon we must add ideas of incorporation, but at the start a
simple contact with external or shared reality has to be made, by the infant's
hallucinating and the world's presenting, with moments of illusion for the
infant in which the two are taken by him to be identical, which they never in
fact are.
For this illusion to be produced in the baby's mind a human being has to be
taking the trouble all the time to bring the world to the baby in understandable
form, and in a limited way, suitable to the baby's needs. For this reason a baby
cannot exist alone, psychologically or physically, and really needs one person
to care for him at first.
The subject of illusion is a very wide one that needs study; it will be found to
provide the clue to a child's interest in bubbles and clouds and rainbows and
all mysterious phenomena, and also to his interest in fluff, which is most
difficult to explain in terms of instinct direct. Somewhere here, too, is the
interest in breath, which never decides whether it comes primarily from within
or without, and which provides a basis for the conception of spirit, soul,
anima.
VIIPRIMITIVE RUTHLESSNESS (STAGE OF PRE-CONCERN)
We are now in a position to look at the earliest kind of relationship between a
baby and his mother.
If one assumes that the individual is becoming integrated and personalized and
has made a good start in his realization, there is still a long way for him to
go before he is related as a whole person to a whole mother, and concerned about
the effect of his own thoughts and actions on her.
We have to postulate an early ruthless object-relationship. This may again be a
theoretical phase only, and certainly no one can be ruthless after the concern
stage except in a dissociated state. But ruthless dissociation states are common
in early childhood, and emerge in certain types of delinquency, and madness, and
must be available in health. The normal child enjoys a ruthless relation to his
mother, mostly showing in play, and he needs his mother because only she can be
expected to tolerate his ruthless relation to her even in play, because this
really hurts her and wears her out. Without this play with her he can only hide
a ruthless self and give it life in a state of dissociation.5
I can bring in here the great fear of disintegration as opposed to the simple
acceptance of primary unintegration. Once the individual has reached the stage
of concern he cannot be oblivious to the result of his impulses, or to the
action of bits of self such as biting mouth, stabbing eyes, piercing yells,
sucking throat, etc., etc. Disintegration means abandonment of the whole
person-object to his impulses, uncontrolled because acting on their own; and
further this conjures up the idea of similarly uncontrolled (because
dissociated) impulses directed towards himself.6
VIII PRIMITIVE RETALIATION
To go back half a stage: it is usual, I think, to postulate a still more
primitive object-relationship in which the object acts in a retaliatory way.
This is prior to a true relation to external reality. In this case the object,
or the environment, is as much part of the self as the instinct is which
conjures it up.7In introversion of early origin and therefore of
primitive quality the individual lives in this environment which is himself, and
a very poor life it is. There is no growth because there is no enrichment from
external reality.
IX THUMB-SUCKING
To illustrate a different method of approach to this subject I add a note on
thumb-sucking (including fist and finger sucking). This can be observed from
birth onwards, and therefore can be presumed to have a meaning which develops
from the primitive to sophistication, and it is important both as a normal
activity and as a symptom of emotional disturbance.
We are familiar with the aspect of thumb-sucking which the term auto-erotic
covers. The mouth is an erotogenic zone, specially organized in infancy, and the
thumb-sucking child enjoys pleasure. He also has pleasurable ideas.
Hate is also expressed when the child damages
5 There is in mythology a ruthless figure—Lilith—whose origin could be usefully
studied.
6 Crocodiles not only shed tears when they do not feel sad—pre-concern tears;
they also readily stand for the ruthless primitive self. (There is much clinical
evidence of this.)
7 This is important because of our relationship to Jung's analytic psychology.
We try to reduce everything to instinct, and the analytic psychologists reduce
everything to this part of the primitive self which looks like environment but
which arises instantly out of instinct (archetypes). We ought to modify our view
to embrace both ideas, and to see, if it is true, that in the earliest
theoretical primitive state the self has its own environment, self-created,
which is as much the self as the instincts that produce it. This is a theme
which requires development.
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We can see in finger-sucking, and in nail-biting especially, a turning-in of
love and hate, for reasons such as the need to preserve the external object of
interest. Also we see a turning-in to self, in face of frustration in love of an
external object.
The subject is not exhausted by this kind of statement and deserves further
study.
I suppose anyone would agree that thumb-sucking is done for consolation, not
just pleasure; the fist or finger is there instead of the breast or mother, or
someone. For instance, a baby of about four months reacted to the loss of his
mother by a tendency to put his fist right down his throat, so that he would
have died had he not been physically prevented from acting this way.
Whereas thumb-sucking is normal and universal, spreading out into the use of the
dummy, and indeed to various activities of normal adults, it is also true that
thumb-sucking persists, in schizoid personalities, and in such cases is
extremely compulsive. In one patient of mine it changed at 10 or 11 into a
compulsion to be always reading.
These phenomena cannot be explained except on the basis that the act is an
attempt to localize the object (breast, etc.), to hold it half-way between in
and out; a defence against loss of object in the external world or in the inside
of the body. I should say, against loss of control over the object, which occurs
in either case.
I have no doubt that normal thumb-sucking has this function too.
The auto-erotic element is not always clearly of paramount importance and
certainly the use of dummy and fist soon becomes a clear defence against
insecurity feelings and other anxieties of a primitive kind.
Finally, every fist-sucking provides a useful dramatization of the primitive
object-relationship in which the object is as much the individual as is the
desire for an object, because it is created out of the desire, or is
hallucinated, and at the beginning is independent of co-operation from external
reality.
Some babies put a finger in the mouth while sucking the breast, thus (in a way)
holding on to self-created reality while using external reality.
CONCLUSION
An attempt has been made to formulate the primitive psychological tendencies
which are normal in early infancy, and which appear regressively in the
psychoses.