by DK
Key works
1946 Ego Hunger and Aggression
1969 Gestalt Therapy Verbatim
1973 The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy
See also: Søren Kierkegaard • Carl Jung • Karen Horney • Erich Fromm • Carl Rogers • Abraham Maslow • Roger Shepard • Jon Kabat-Zinn • Max Wertheimer
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Psychoanalysis
BEFORE
1900s Sigmund Freud suggests that neurotic conflicts (and the superego) arise in the Oedipal period—between ages three and six.
1930s Melanie Klein claims that a primitive form of the superego develops during the first year of life, and that love and hate are inherently linked.
AFTER
1947 Psychologist and play therapist Virginia Axline develops her eight principles of play therapy, which include: “Accept the child as she or he is.”
1979 Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller says in The Drama of the Gifted Child that we are encouraged to “develop the art of not experiencing feelings.”
Many people believe that if a child has suffered an upbringing that was lacking in love and support, he or she will be able to settle and flourish with a new family that provides what is needed. However, while stability and acceptance help to give a foundation in which a child can grow and find a healthy state of being, these qualities make up only one part of what is required.
As the first pediatrician in England to train as a psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott had a unique insight into the mother-infant relationship and the developmental process of children. He was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud but also by the writings of Melanie Klein, particularly regarding the unconscious feelings of the mother or carer for the infant. Winnicott began his career by working with children displaced by World War II and he examined the difficulties faced by children who are trying to adapt to a new home.
As Winnicott notes in his paper, Hate in the Countertransference: “It is notoriously inadequate to take an adopted child into one’s home and love him.” In fact, the parents must be able to take the adopted child into their home and be able to tolerate hating him. Winnicott states that a child can believe he or she is loved only after being hated; he stresses that the role that “tolerance of hate” plays in healing cannot be underestimated.
Winnicott explains that when a child has been deprived of proper parental nurturing, and is then granted a chance of this in a healthy family environment, such as with an adoptive or foster family, the child begins to develop unconscious hope. But fear is associated with this hope. When a child has been so devastatingly disappointed in the past, with even basic emotional or physical needs unsatisfied, defenses arise. These are unconscious forces that protect the child against the hope that may lead to disappointment. The defenses, maintains Winnicott, explain the presence of hatred. The child will “act out” in an outburst of anger against the new parental figure, expressing hatred and, in turn, invoking hatred from the carer. He termed the behavior an “antisocial tendency.”
According to Winnicott, for a child who has suffered, the need to hate and be hated is deeper even than the need for rebellion, and the importance of the carer tolerating the hate is an essential factor in the healing of the child. Winnicott says that the child must be allowed to express the hatred, and the parent must be able to tolerate both the child’s and their own hatred as well.
The idea may be shocking, and people may struggle with the notion that they feel hatred rising within them. They may feel guilty, because the child has been through such difficulties already. Yet the child is actively behaving hatefully toward the parent, projecting past experiences of being neglected and ignored onto present-day reality.
The child of a broken home or without parents, Winnicott says, “spends his time unconsciously looking for his parents” and so feelings from past relationships are displaced onto another adult. The child has internalized the hate, and sees it even when it is no longer present. In his new situation, the child needs to see what happens when hatred is in the air. Winnicott explains: “What happens is that after a while a child so adopted gains hope, and then he starts to test out the environment he has found, and to seek proof of his guardian’s ability to hate objectively.”
There are many ways for a child to express hatred and prove that he or she is indeed not worthy of being loved. This worthlessness is the message that was imparted by earlier, negative parental experiences. From the child’s point of view, he is attempting to protect himself from the risk of ever having to feel love or to be loved because of the potential disappointment that accompanies that state of being.
"It seems that an adopted child can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated."
Donald Winnicott
The “antisocial tendency” in children is a way they express anxieties about their world, testing out their caregivers who must continue to provide a supportive and caring home.
Dealing with the hatred
The emotions that the child’s hatred invokes in the parents, as well as in the child’s teachers and other authority figures, are very real. Winnicott believes that it is essential that adults acknowledge these feelings, rather than deny them, which might seem easier. They also need to understand that the child’s hatred is not personal; the child is expressing anxiety about his previous unhappy situation with the person who is now at hand.
What the authority figure does with their own hatred, of course, is of critical importance. The child’s belief that he or she is “bad” and unworthy of being loved must not be reinforced by the response from the adult; the adult must simply tolerate the feelings of hatred and realize that these feelings are part of the relationship. This is the only way the child will feel secure and be able to form an attachment.
No matter how loving a new environment may be, it does not erase the past for the child; there will still be residual feelings as a result of their past experience. Winnicott sees no short cuts to a resolution. The child is expecting that the adult’s feelings of hatred will lead to rejection, because that is what has happened before; when the hatred does not lead to rejection and is tolerated instead, it can begin to dissipate.
Despite feeling the unconscious and natural negative feelings provoked by the child, a parent must provide an environment that “holds” the child, making him or her feel secure.
Healthy hatred
Even in psychologically healthy families with children who have not been displaced, Winnicott believes unconscious hatred is a natural, essential part of the parenting experience and speaks of “hating appropriately.” Melanie Klein had suggested that a baby feels hatred for its mother, but Winnicott proposes that this is preceded by the mother hating the baby—and that even before this, there is an extraordinary primitive or “ruthless” love. The baby’s existence places huge demands on the mother psychologically and physically and these evoke feelings of hatred in the mother. Winnicott’s list of 18 reasons why the mother hates the baby include: that the pregnancy and birth have endangered her life; that the baby is an interference with her private life; that the baby hurts her when nursing, even biting her; and that the baby “treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave.” Despite all of this she also loves him, “excretions and all”, says Winnicott, with a hugely powerful, primitive love, and has to learn how to tolerate hating her baby without in any way acting on it. If she cannot hate appropriately, he claims, she turns the feelings of hatred toward herself, in a way that is masochistic and unhealthy.
Therapeutic relationship
Winnicott also used the relationsh
ip between the parent and child as an analogy for the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client. The feelings that arise in a therapist during analysis are part of a phenomenon known as “countertransference.” Feelings that are aroused in the client during therapy—usually feelings about parents or siblings—are transferred onto the therapist. In his paper, Winnicott described how as part of the analysis, the therapist feels hate toward the client, though this hate was generated by the patient as a necessary part of testing that the therapist can bear it. The patient needs to know that the therapist is strong and reliable enough to withstand this onslaught.
A realistic approach
While some of Winnicott’s ideas may appear shocking, he believes we should be realistic about bringing up children, avoiding sentimentality in favor of honesty. This enables us as children, and later as adults, to acknowledge and deal with natural, unavoidable negative feelings. Winnicott is a realist and pragmatist; he refuses to believe in the mythical idea of “the perfect family” or in a world where a few kind words wipe away all of the horrors that may have preceded it. He prefers to see the real environment and mental states of our experience, and asks us to do likewise, with courageous honesty. His ideas did not fit neatly into one school of thought, though they were hugely influential, and continue to impact on social work, education, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis around the world.
"Sentimentality in a mother is no good at all from the infant’s point of view."
Donald Winnicott
DONALD WINNICOTT
The English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott was the youngest child and only son born to a prominent, prosperous family living in Plymouth, England. His father, Sir John Frederick Winnicott, was an encouraging influence, although his mother suffered from depression. Winnicott first trained as a physician and pediatrician, completing psychoanalytic training later, in the 1930s.
Winnicott married twice, meeting his second wife Clare Britton, a psychiatric social worker, while working with disturbed children who had been evacuated during World War II. He continued to work as a pediatrician for more than 40 years and this gave his ideas a unique perspective. He twice served as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and sought to widen public knowledge through his many lectures and broadcasts.
Key works
1947 Hate in the Countertransference
1951 Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena
1960 The Theory of the Parent—Infant Relationship
See also: Sigmund Freud • Melanie Klein • Virginia Satir • John Bowlby
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Psychoanalysis
BEFORE
1807 German philosopher Georg Hegel states that consciousness of self depends on the presence of the Other.
1818 German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer claims that there can be no object without a subject to observe it, and that perception of the object is limited by personal vision and experience.
1890 William James in The Principles of Psychology distinguishes between the self as the knower, or “I,” and the self as the known, or “me.”
AFTER
1943 French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre states that our perception of the world around us, or the Other, alters when another person appears; we absorb his or her concept of the Other into our own.
Psychoanalysts explain the unconscious as the place where all the memories that we wish to push aside are stored, and cannot be retrieved consciously. The unconscious sometimes speaks to the conscious self in limited ways: Carl Jung believed that the unconscious presents itself to the waking self through dreams, symbols, and in the language of archetypes, while Freud saw it as expressing itself through motivational behavior and accidental “slips of the tongue.” The one thing that the various psychoanalytical schools do agree on is that the unconscious holds a bigger picture than that retained by the conscious self. For French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, however, the language of the unconscious is not that of the self, but of the “Other.”
A sense of self
We easily take for granted the notion of the self—that each of us exists as a separate, individual being, who views the world through our own eyes, is familiar with the boundaries that separate us from others and from the world around us, and assumes a separateness in thinking and in the way we interact with our environment. But what if there was nothing out there that we could recognize as being separate from ourselves? We would then be unable to conceptualize our sense of self, because there would be no delineated being to think about. The only way we have of determining that as individuals we are distinct from the world all around us is our ability to recognize the separateness of ourselves from our environment, or from the Other, which allows us to become the subject “I.” Lacan therefore concluded that each of us is a “self” only because we have a concept of the Other.
For Lacan, the Other is the absolute otherness that lies beyond the self; it is the environment into which we are born, and which we have to “translate” or make sense of, in order to survive and thrive. An infant must learn to assemble sensations into concepts and categories in order to function in the world, and he or she does this through gradually acquiring an awareness and understanding of a series of signifiers—signs or codes. But these signifiers can only come to us from the external world that lies beyond the self, therefore they must have been formed from the language—or what Lacan prefers to call the “discourse”—of the Other.
We are only able to think or to express our ideas and emotions through language, and the only language we have, according to Lacan, is that of the Other. The sensations and images that translate into the thoughts of our unconscious must therefore be constructed from this language of the Other, or, as Lacan stated, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” This idea has had a wide influence on the practice of psychoanalysis, leading to a more objective and open interpretation of the unconscious.
"The I is always in the field of the Other."
Jacques Lacan
Our sense of self is shaped by our awareness of the “Other,” or the world outside ourselves. However, Lacan stated, it is the language of the Other that forms our deepest thoughts.
JACQUES LACAN
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born in Paris, where he was educated at the Collège Stanislas. He went on to study medicine, specializing in psychiatry. Lacan remained in occupied Paris during World War II, working at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital.
After the war, psychoanalysis became the key tool in Lacan’s work. However, he was expelled by the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1953, after an argument over his “deviant” use of shorter length therapy sessions. Lacan then set up La Société Française de Psychanalytique.
Lacan’s writings extend into philosophy, art, literature, and linguistics, and he gave weekly seminars that were attended by eminent thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss. A keen Freudian, Lacan formed the École Freudienne de Paris in 1963, and the École de la Cause Freudienne in 1981.
Key works
1966 Écrits
1968 The Language of the Self
1954–80 The Seminars (27 volumes)
See also: William James • Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung • Donald Hebb
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Humanistic psychoanalysis
BEFORE
1258–61 The Sufi mystic Rumi says that the longing of the human soul comes from separation from its source.
1950s Rollo May says that the �
��true religion” consists of facing life’s challenges with purpose and meaning, through accepting responsibility and making choices.
AFTER
1950 Karen Horney says that the neurotic self is split between an idealized and a real self.
1960s Abraham Maslow defines creativity and thinking of others as characteristics of self-actualized people.
1970s Fritz Perls says that we must find ourselves in order to achieve self-actualization.
The ability to find meaning in our lives is the defining characteristic of humankind. According to the German-American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, it also determines whether we follow a path of joy and fulfilment or tread a road of dissatisfaction and strife. Fromm believed that although life is inherently painful, we can make it bearable by giving it meaning, through pursuing and constructing an authentic self. The ultimate aim of a human life is to develop what Fromm described as “the most precious quality man is endowed with—the love of life.”
Life is inherently fraught with emotional frustration, according to Fromm, because man lives in a state of struggle. He is constantly trying to balance his individual nature—his existence as a separate being—with his need for connection. There is a part of man’s inherent self that only knows how to exist in a united state with others; it lives at one with nature and at one with other people. Yet we see ourselves as separated from nature, and isolated from one another. Worse still, we have the unique capacity to ponder the fact of this separation and think about our isolation. Man, gifted with reason, is life being aware of itself.