Thomas Ogden: Reading Winnicott
The author offers a reading of Winnicott's (1945 "Primitive Emotional Development," a work containing the seeds of vitually all the major contributions to psychoanalysis that Winnicott would make over the course of the succeeding twenty-six years of his life. The present author demonstates the interdependence of the life of the ideas being developed and the life of the writing in this seminal paper of Winnicott's. What "Primitive Emotional Development" has to offer to a psychoanalytic reader cannot be said in any other way (which is to say that the writing is extraordinarily resistant to paraphrase). It has been this author's experience-which he hopes to convey to the reader-that an awareness of the way the language is woking in Winnicott's writings significantly enhances what can be learned from reading them.
Style and content are inseparable in writing. The better the writing, the more this interdependence is utilized in the service of creating meaning. In recent years, I have found that the only way I can do justice to studying and teaching Winnicott is to read his papers aloud, line by line, as I would a poem, exploring what the language is doing in addition to what it is saying. It is not an overstatement to say that a great many passages from Winnicott's papers well deserve to be called prose poems. In these passages, Winnicott's writing meets Tom Stoppard's (1999) definition of poetry as "the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning" (p.10).
In this paper, I will focus on Winnicott's 1945 paper, "Primitive Emotional Development," which I view as his earliest major contribution to psychoanalysis. I will not be limiting myself to an explication of Winnicott's paper, though a good many of the ideas developed there will be discussed. My principal interest is in looking at this paper as a piece of non-fiction literature in which the meeting of reader and writing generates an imaginative experience in the medium of language. To speak of Winnicott's writing as literature is not to minimize its value as a way of conveying ideas that have proved to be of enormous importance to the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice; on the contrary, my effort will be to demonstrate the ways in which the life of the writing is critical to, and inseparable from, the life of the ideas. 1
Before looking closely at "Primitive Emotional Development," I will offer a few observations about matters of writing that run through virtually the entirety of Winnicott's opus. The first quality of his writing to strike the reader is its form. Unlike the papers of any other psychoanalyst I can think of, Winnicott's papers are brief (usually six to ten pages in length), often containing a moment in the middle when he takes the reader aside and says, in a single sentence, "the essential feature of my communication is this..." (Winnicott 1971 a, p.50). But the most distinctive signature of Wlnnicott's writing is the voice. It is casual and conversational, yet always profoundly respectful of both the reader and the subject matter under discussion. The speaking voice gives itself permission to wander, and yet has the compactness of poetry; there is an extraordinary intelligence to the voice that is at the same time genuinely humble and well aware of its limitations; there is a disarming intimacy that at times takes cover in wit and charm; the voice is playful and imaginative; but never folksy or sentimental.
Any effort to convey a sense of the voice in Winnicott's writing must locate at its core the quality of playfulness. The types of playfulness encountered in Winnicott's writing have an enormous range. To name only a few: There are the un-self-conscious feats of imaginative, compassionate understanding in his accounts of "squiggle games" (1917b) with his child patients. There is serious playfulness (or playful seriousness) when Winnicott is involved in an effort to generate a form of thinking/theorizing that is adequate to the paradoxical nature of human experience as he understands it. He takes delight in subtle word play, such as in the repetition of a familiar phrase in slightly different forms to refer to the patient's need to begin and to end analysis: "I do analysis because that is what the patient needs to have done and to have done with" (1962, p. 166).
While his writing is personal, there is also a certain English reserve to Winnicott that befits the paradoxical combination of formality and intimacy that is a hallmark of psychoanalysis (Ogden 1989). In terms of all these matters of form and voice, Winnicott's work holds strong resemblances to the compact, intelligent, playful, at times charming, at times ironic, always irreducible writing of Borges's Fictions (1944) and of Robert Frost's prose and poetry.
Winnicott's inimitable voice can be heard almost immediately in "Primitive Emotional Development" as he explains his "methodology":
I shall not first give an 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. [p. 145]
bits of others (introjects)-or for the writer, the ideas of other writers-must
not be allowed to take over the process of creating meaning. "My mind does not
work that way," nor does that of the healthy infant in the
care of a healthy mother. The individual's own lived experience must be the
basis for creating coherence for one's self and the integrity of oneself. Only
after a sense of self has begun to come into being (for the infant and for the
writer) can one acknowledge the contributions of others to the creation of
oneself (and one's ideas): "... last of all I interest myself in where I stole
what."
Winnicott then briefly discusses several aspects of the analytic relationship,
with particular emphasis on the transference-countertransference. It is this
body of experience that he believes is a major source of his conception of
primitive emotional development. I will examine only one brief passage (two
sentences, to be precise) of Winnicott's discussion of the transference-countertransference
in "Primitive Emotional Development." I have selected these sentences because I
find them to be of enormous importance, both from the standpoint of
understanding his conception of the workings of the analytic relationship, and
from the
standpoint of the powerful interdependence of language and ideas in Winnicott's
work:
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 coincident love and hate of him. [pp. 145-147]
In the opening clause of the first of these two sentences, Winnicott not only
offers a theory of depression radically different from those of Freud and Klein,
but he also proposes a new conception of the role of countertransference in the
analytic process. He suggests here that depression is not, most fundamentally, a
pathological identification with the hated aspect of an ambivalently loved (and
lost) object in an unconscious effort to avoid experiencing anger toward the
lost object (Freud 1914). Nor does Winnicott understand depression as centered
around the unconscious fantasy that one's anger has injured, driven away, or
killed the loved object (Klein 1952).
In the space of a single sentence, Winnicott suggests (by means of his use of
the idea, rather than through his explication of it) that depression is a
manifestation of the patient's taking on as his own (in fantasy, taking into
himself) the mother's depression (or that of other loved objects), with the
unconscious aim of relieving her of her depression. What is astounding is that
this conception of the patient's depression is presented not through a direct
statement, but by means of a sentence that is virtually incomprehensible unless
the reader takes the initiative of doing the work of creating/discovering the
conception of the intergenerational origins of
dynamic structure of depression. Only after the reader has accomplished this
task does it begin to make sense why "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."2In other words, if the analyst is unable to cope with his own feelings of
depression (both normative and pathological), arising from past and current life
experience, the analyst will not be able to recognize (to feel in the moment)
the ways in which the
patient is unconsciously attempting to, and to some degree succeeding in, taking
on the depression of the analyst-as-transference-mother.
Those aspects of the analyst's depression that arise from sources independent of the analyst's unconscious identification with the patient's depressed internal object mother are far less available to the patient's ministerings. This is because the patient cannot find in the analyst the depression of his mother, which for nearly the entirely of his life, the patient has intimately known and attended to. The patient is single-mindedly concerned with the depression that is unique to the internal object mother. (Each person's depression is his or her own unique
creation, rooted in the particular circumstances of life experience and personality organization.)
The second clause of the sentence under discussion, while introduced by
Winnicott as if it were simply another way of saying what he has already said in
the first clause ("or shall I say") is in fact something altogether new: "[The
analyst of a depressed patient must cope with his own] ... guilt and grief
resultant from the destructive elements in his own (the analyst's) love."
Thus, the analyst of the depressed patient must also be able to live with the
inevitable destructiveness of love, in the sense that love involves a demand on
the loved object, which may (in fantasy, and at times, in reality) be too much
of a strain for the person one loves. In other words, the analyst in the course
of personal analysis and by means of ongoing self-analysis, must sufficiently
come to terms with his own fears of the draining effects of love to be able to
love the patient without fear that such feelings will harm the patient, thereby
causing the analyst "guilt and grief."3
Winnicott does not stop here. In the sentence that follows the quoted passage,
he revolutionizes (and I use the word advisedly) the psychoanalytic conception
of "the analytic frame" by viewing it as a medium for the expression of the
analyst's hatred of the patient: "...the end of the hour, the end of the
analysis, the rules and regulations, these all come in as expressions of [the
analyst's] hate" (p. 147). These words derive a good deal of their power from
the fact that the truth of the idea that the analyst expresses his hate in these
actions
(which are so ordinary as to frequently go unnoticed) is immediately
recognizable by the analytic reader as part of his experience with virtually
every patient. Winnicott is recognizing/lnterpreting the unspoken expressions of
hate that the analyst/reader unconsciously and preconsciously experiences (often
accompanied by a feeling of relief) in "throwing the patient out" (by punctually
ending each meeting), and by establishing the limits of what he will provide for
the patient (in maintaining the other aspects of the analytic frame). Implicit
here is the notion that the analyst's fear of the destructiveness of his hatred
of the patient can lead to treatment-destructive breaches of the analytic frame,
such as the analyst's extending the session for more than a few minutes in order
"not to cut the patient off," or the analyst's setting the fee at a level below
what the patient is able to afford "because the patient was consistently
exploited by his parents in childhood," or reflexively telephoning the patient
when the patient has missed a session "to be sure he is all right, " and so on.
Only by looking closely at these sentences can one discern and appreciate what
is going on in the very living relationship between the writing and the reader,
which constitutes so much of the life of the ideas being developed. As we have
seen, the writing demands that the reader become an active partner in the
creation of meaning. The writing (like the communications of an analysand)
suggest, and only suggests, possibilities of meaning. The reader/analyst must be
willing and able not to know in order to make room inside himself for a number
of possible meanings to be experienced/created, and to allow one meaning or
another, or several meanings concurrently, to achieve ascendance (for a time).
Moreover, it is important to note that the writing "works" (to borrow a word
from Winnicott's statement of his "method") in large measure by means of its
power to understand (to correctly interpret the unconscious of) the reader.
Perhaps all good writing (whether it be in poems, plays, novels, or essays), to
a significant degree, "works" in this way.
Wlnnicott's writing in the paper under discussion (and in almost all the works
included in his three major volumes of collected papers [1958, 1965, 1971c]) is
surprisingly short on clinical material. This, I believe, is a consequence of
the fact that the clinical experience is to such a large degree located in the
reader's experience of "being read" (that is, of being interpreted, understood)
by the writing. When Winnicott does offer clinical material, he often refers not
to a specific intervention with a particular patient, but to a "very common
experience" (1945, p. 150) in analysis. In this way, he implicitly asks the
reader to draw on his own lived experience with patients for the purpose not of
"taking in" Winnicott's ideas, but of inviting from the reader an "original
response" (Frost 1942, p. 307).
Still other forms of the generative interplay of style and content, of writing
and reader, take on central importance in a passage a bit later in "Primitive
Emotional Development," one that addresses experiences of unintegration and
integration in early development:
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 must interpret this as the patient's need to be known in all his bits and pieces by one person, the analyst. To be known means to feel integrated at least in the person of the analyst. This is the ordinary stuff of infant life, and an infant who has had no one person to gather his bits together starts with a handicap in his own self-integrating task, and perhaps he cannot succeed, or at any rate cannot maintain integration with confidence....
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. [p. 150]
Winnicott then provides the reader with a major revision of analytic technique.
He accomplishes this so subtly that the reader is apt not to notice it if he is
not attending carefully to what is going on in the writing. Nothing short of a
new way of being with and talking to patients is being offered to the reader,
without preaching or fanfare: "Sometimes we must interpret4this [the patient's
giving every detail of his week-end] as the patient's need to be known in all
his bits and pieces by one person, the analyst." The phrase "sometimes we must"
addresses the reader as a colleague who is familiar with the clinical situation
being described, and who has very likely felt it necessary to intervene in the
way Winnicott describes. Perhaps the reader/analyst has not fully named for
himself what he has been experiencing and doing with his patient. The language
does not debunk the angry resistance interpretation that the reader/analyst has
either made or has been inclined to make in response to feelings of frustration
and sense of failure. Winnicott, by means of the language with which he
addresses the reader, provides an experience in reading, one that helps the
reader undefensively gather together his own unarticulated experiences from his
own analysis and from his analytic work with patients.
Moreover, the simple phrase "very common experience" conveys an important
theoretical concept (again without calling attention to itself): primitive
states of unintegration are not restricted to the analysis of severely disturbed
patients; such states regularly occur in the analysis of all our patients,
including the healthiest ones. This writing "technique" does not have the feel
of manipulation of the reader: rather, it feels like a good interpretation-a
statement that puts into words what the reader/analyst has known all along from
personal experience, but has not known that he has known it, and has not known
it in the verbally symbolized, integrated way that he is coming to know it.
The second paragraph of the passage being discussed is remarkable:
There are long stretches of time in a normal infant's life in which a baby does not mind whether he is in 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.
The reader of the sentence being discussed is not moved to question how
Winnicott can possibly know what an infant feels, or to point out that
regressions in the analyses of children and adults (whether psychotic,
depressed, or quite healthy) bear a very uncertain correlation with infantile
experience. Rather, the reader is inclined to suspend disbelief for a time, and
to enter into the experience of reading (with Winnicott), allowing himself to be
carried by the music of the language and ideas. The reader lives an experience
in the act of reading that is something like that of the imagined infant who
does not mind whether he is in many bits (experiencing a floating feeling that
accompanies nonlinear thinking) or one whole being (experiencing a "momentary
stay against confusion" [Frost 1939, p. 777]). Winnicott's writing, like a guide
"who only has at heart your getting lost" (Frost 1947, p. 341), ensures that we
will never get it right in any final way, and we do not mind.
Subliminally, the pun on mind allows the clause "a baby does not mind whether he
is in many bits or one whole being" to concentrate into itself different
overlapping meanings. The baby "does not mind" because the mother is there
"minding" him (taking care of him). And he "does not mind" in that he feels no
pressure to be "minded," that is, to create premature, defensive mindedness that
is disconnected from bodily experience. The writing itself, in punning, deftly
and un self-consciously, creates just such an experience of the pleasure of not
minding, of not having to know, of not having to pin down meaning, and instead
simply enjoying the liveliness of a fine experience in the medium of language
and ideas.
The language that Winnicott uses in describing the infant's coming together in
one place is surprising, in that the "place" where coming together occurs is not
a place at all, but an action (the act of feeling something). Moreover, the
infant, in "coming together," does not simply feel, he "feels something." The
word something has a delightful ambiguity to it: "something" is a concrete
thing, the object that is felt; and, at the same time, "something" is the most
indefinite of words, suggesting only that some feeling is being experienced.
This delicate ambiguity creates in the experience of reading the flickering of
the feeling-world of the infant, a world
loosely bound to objects, loosely localized, experienced now in the body as
objectless sensation, now in the more defined and localized sensation of feeling
an object, now in the mother's face.5
The unexpected turns, the quiet revolutions occurring in this early Winnicott
paper, are too numerous to address. I cannot resist, however, taking a moment
simply to marvel at the way in which Winnicott, the pediatrician, the child
analyst, nonchalantly jettisons the accrued technical language of fifty years of
psychoanalytic writing in favour of language that is alive with the experiences
being described:
...There are 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. [p. 151]
The infant has both quiet and excited states-everyone who has spent time with a
baby knows this, but why had no one thought to put it this way? The baby feels
"this and that" [there is ease in the language, just as there is ease in the
baby's state of mind-body], and enjoys the "skin stimulation of bathing" and
"cannot be said to be aware ... that [in the quiet states] ... he is the same as
himself screaming for immediate satisfaction..." How better to describe the
feeling of continuity of identity over different feeling/meaning states than
with unobtrusive alliteration of S sounds-sixteen times in one sentence-in words
carrying a very wide range of meaning, including:states, start, skin,
stimulation, same, screaming, satisfaction, something,andsatisfied?6
Winnicott continues:
Also I think there is not necessarily an integration between a child asleep and a child awake... .Once 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. [p. 151, italics in original]
In this part of the paper, Winnicott speaks of the importance of the experience
of the child's dream being conveyed "somehow to a third person." Every time I
read this sentence, I find it jarring and confusing. I attempt to account for a
third person in the apparently two-person experience of a dream (not yet the
child's creation or possession) being "conveyed somehow" to a third person. Is
the third person the experience of the father's symbolic presence even in his
absence? Perhaps, but such an idea seems too much an experience of the mind
disconnected from the bodily feel, the sense of aliveness that one experiences,
when engaging with a child in spoken or unspoken conversation. A dream can be
unobtrusively inserted into a conversation or into playing, sometimes
wordlessly, because the child is the dream before the dream is the child's.
Thus, from this perspective, the three people are the dreaming child, the waking
child, and the adult. This interpretation is suggested by Winnicott's language,
but the reader, once again, must do the work of imaginatively entering into the
experience of reading. The language quietly creates (as opposed to discusses)
the confusion that the reader/child experiences about how many people are
present in the act of conveying a dream to an adult. The reader experiences what
it feels like for a child to be two people and not to notice that experience
until an adult gives him help in "getting to know ... [what are becoming his]
dreams." "Getting to know" his dreams-the expression is uniquely Winnicott; no
one else could have written these words. The phrase is implicitly a metaphor in
which an adult "makes the introductions" in the first meeting of a waking child
and the child's dreams. In this imaginary social event, not only is the child
learning that he has a dream life, but also the child's unconscious is learning
that "it" (who, in health, is forever in the process of becoming "I") has a
waking life.