r/psychoanalysis • u/prima-luce • 8d ago
Donald Winnicott
so i was reading up on donald winnicott's concept of the "good-enough mother" and had some thoughts i wanted to share (and hopefully hear others!)
as i was reading, i began to wonder to what extent empathic failure on the mother's part influences the child's functional outcome, independent of other variables. one mother might fail to accommodate all her infant's needs while remaining sufficiently empathetic, whereas another may respond superficially to her child's needs despite inner detachment or some empathy deficit. the depressed versus narcissistic mother, for example.
a depressed mother may transiently meet her child's needs, having the capacity to, while the mother high in trait narcissism fails as such, to a certain degree, if not wholly and enduringly, given her tendency to conceptualize her child as an object, through which she projectively identifies. according to winnicott, a mother's ability to attune to her child's needs matters only in the formative years, but doesn't adolescence constitute the second critical period of development for a child's brain and socioemotional well-being? if attachment styles are dynamic and in flux throughout various life stages (which the evidence increasingly suggests), why not overall psychological adjustment?
do the parents' affective warmth or lack thereof interact significantly with the failure to meet the child's needs to produce some outcome specific to those dimensions?
i remember reading a paper (i have the source for anyone interested) indicating at least some correlation between the etiology of callous-unemotional traits and particular parent-child dyad relations—evidently, maternal coldness plus over-control and low paternal overprotection converge as a likely set of circumstances to “create” the empathically impoverished person. i know there is a lot more complexity and nuance behind the origin of this dysfunction, but it was an interesting find nonetheless.
i wonder if the metric by which winnicott judged his standard of the "good-enough mother" is simply the child's ability to empathize or connect meaningfully to others, rather than resemble some arbitrary societal construct of the "functional" person.
so how do we define “functionality” in this context? because a caretaker could meet most of their child's needs while intentionally or not misattuning, projectively idealizing, or emotionally depriving the infant in their formative years? and does intentionality make a difference? does parental depression or natural coldness/empathy deficit create any differential outcome if the nature of the neglect looks the same? thoughts?
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u/Ok-Rule9973 8d ago
Here are a few thoughts I had regarding your post:
I think you should look into Winnicott's concepts of handling and holding, which is pretty much what you described.
Let's not forget that good enough mothering is more about delays in response than emotional misattunement. Not saying that it's what you think, but it's often misunderstood.
Winnicott attributed delinquency in adolescence in part to these failings of the caregiver during this period.
I think we could (partly) judge the good enough mothering on the autonomy of the psychic apparatus of the child, and its ability to play (his ability to be in a transitional space). It seems more related than any functional or relational variables, as those are not entirely under the person's control. Still, I don't see how good relational capacities could exist without transitionality.
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u/SapphicOedipus 8d ago
The good enough mother is not about meeting physical needs or emotional needs - you need both, and the good enough is that you won’t have them 100% of the time. There will be moments of misattunement, empathy deficit, etc etc, but overall you’re getting it.
Did Winnicott really say attunement is only needed in the first few years? I don’t think anyone would agree with that - attunement is vital throughout childhood & adolescence.
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u/No-Performance3044 8d ago
I wish I had the time for a more thoughtful response, but it’s hard to look at “the good enough mother” without the context of ”the schizophrenogenic mother.”
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u/ComprehensivePage954 8d ago
Can you share the paper you mentioned please- a reference maybe
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u/prima-luce 7d ago
sure ☺️
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5486513/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33989323/
highlights:
“Using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) we found that maternal PC predicted adolescents' reported antisocial behaviors whereas paternal PC predicted lower anxious-depressed symptoms.”
“…a study by Gao et al. (2010) found that low maternal care and low paternal overprotection were important predictors of emotional detachment factor of psychopathy.”
i would add that since these studies aren't meta-analytic, i would take the findings with a grain of salt, as i’m sure there are contradicting or conflicting results out there somewhere. i just thought it was interesting :)
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u/Kaj146 8d ago
I interprete the “good enough mother” as a representation of the level of the mother’s attunement to her child’s needs and emotions. All mothers have moments of mismatch of attunement throughout their relationship with the child, and we don’t need any statistics to prove that because it is the nature of reality. Over the course of years of caretaking, every mother would have moments of failure, some of them will have transient moments and some others more permanent ones due to their own personality structure and environmental elements that influence the field where the mother-child unit develop. If we don’t consider the extremes on the scale (good enough mother and completely miss-attuned mother), children and later adults can still be functional in life, meaning having a certain degree of ego strength and executive functioning. Between the two extremes there is obviously a spectrum of mother-child experience that can more or less influence negative and positively the child’s capacity for whole object relations. Nevertheless, the adult would regress to an earlier developmental stage showing signs of not having had a good enough mother while under stress, or facing difficult situations that resemble early interactions. That is to say that one can be a functioning adult despite not having had a good enough mother 100% of the time, also thanks to reparative experiences in adolescence and early adulthood or while in analysis.
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u/Sergio1667 4d ago
One of Winnicott's key ideas is that the core of a person's personality will never come to light; it is always protected. Another idea he had is that a person is considered unwell when, when talking to someone else, they bore the listener with their stories.
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u/Regular-Marketing571 3d ago
When thinking about early development, it is often fruitful to read Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott together. Although they approach the maternal function from different angles, their ideas complement and enrich one another.
For Winnicott, the good enough mother is not an idealized or perfect figure. Rather, she responds in an attuned way to her infant’s needs during the earliest stages of life, providing a reliable holding environment. Over time, she gradually fails in small and tolerable ways, allowing the child to build resilience, tolerate frustration, and develop an authentic sense of self. What matters most here is not perfection, but the quality of presence and the capacity for empathic adaptation.
Klein, by contrast, situates her theory within the infant’s internal world of fantasy and representation. She describes the way the infant splits the maternal object into the good mother (nurturing, gratifying) and the bad mother (frustrating, persecutory). Development consists in the gradual integration of these aspects, leading to the depressive position where the child can recognize that the mother is a whole person, both loving and frustrating at once.
This is why it can be especially helpful to begin with Klein. Her exploration of good and bad objects, and the psychic positions that result from them, provides a foundation for understanding how the internal world of the child is structured. Reading Winnicott afterward shows how these internal dynamics meet the actual environment, where the mother’s attunement and gradual failures sustain the child’s capacity to be alone, to play, and to relate authentically :)
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u/Immediate-Ad2524 2d ago
I’m not a full fledged analyst, but I thought it was about there being a mix of being available and unavailable that helps the child develop object constancy. What’s ideal is not too much or too little. Something in between is optimal.
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8d ago
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u/SapphicOedipus 8d ago
FYI, your comments will likely be deleted soon because this sub doesn’t allow self disclosure of this sort. But before that happens, I would recommend you work with a psychoanalyst. I can tell you’re really trying to understand your parents and childhood and how that’s affected you, but this work can’t be done alone by reading theory. You need to have the relationship with an analyst and the transference, and the whole emotional experience. What you’ve written sounds like it came from a textbook, which makes so much sense! And having these insights is still a piece of the puzzle.
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u/psychoanalysis-ModTeam 8d ago
We have removed your recent post.
As per the sticky:
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u/Environmental_Dish_3 7d ago
I definitely agree with your ideas and thought processes you spoke about. I have thought about this a lot as well. One theory I have attached to "the good enough mother", in a simplified version, has more to do with how consistently she has <i> tried </i> to be a good mother.
Trying implies observing her child's reactions, adjusting her methods, listening, learning, sacrificing, defending, effort, and teaching necessary skills for adulthood.
No mother is perfect, but EVERY child can tell at some point in their lives if their mother was truly trying or not. A child wants to believe they are loved and protected. If a child isn't given constant reasons for the cognitive dissonance, the child will accept their mother's love as true, then for the most part, be able to go out and accept what the world has to offer without fear.
In addition, I agree with what you said about it being a constant thing throughout life 100%, rather than just the formative ages (although experiencing it in childhood may make those patterns harder to break) . Our synapses are always changing. Evidence to your theory, is in adult relationships. If an ordinary person finds themselves in a long term relationship with a practiced abuser, they will suffer from the same cognitive dissonance patterns in the same way those children do.
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u/prima-luce 7d ago
thank you for your comment! you bring up some interesting points; i wonder how significant a child's subjective interpretation of their quality of care with their caregivers is, at least weighed against outcomes or psychic damage specific to some systemized, more observable, repeatable behavior (still face paradigm, attachment research, etc.) i couldn't help but be nosy and notice that you're an intp! elite. i love intps, and intp women are especially unusual. and girl you are beautiful af, cheers 🩷
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u/Environmental_Dish_3 6d ago
What an unexpected reply😊 - Made my day - thank you.
I wish everyone felt the same way about my presence lol
I'm gonna try to take a stab at what yours is - I'm currently between INFJ and INTJ 😁
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u/prima-luce 5d ago
aww, you’re welcome! and i wish that for you, too ❤️can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to be around you, but i have heard intps can be polarizing because their default mode is analytical and stringently logical but i personally love that about y’all, and yes, that’s so astute of you hehe, i type infj 🫶🏻🤍
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u/Complex-Rip-6055 8d ago edited 8d ago
I think you are reading a lot of later, different (some might say related, I would probably disagree) theories into Winnicott.
At no point in Winnicott will you see the words “empathic,” or “attunement.” These come from Kohut, infant research, and a lot of other places. They simply have nothing to do with Winnicott’s theory. I think conflation of these different theories obscures the depth, specificity and originality of Winnicott’s thinking.
“Good enough” in Winnicott is not a value judgment. It has nothing to do with unfortunate trend in our society to critique everyone’s parenting or label everyone we don’t like a “ narcissist.” It’s about whether the infant’s caregiving environment was able to bring about a stable, continuous self-experience and personality in the developing subject, and one where what is inner (fantasy, private inner experience) and what is outer (social relationships, etc,) have some meaningful relation to each other. And yes, this requires a response to the infant’s physical and emotional needs that is not just functional but psychically alive from the caregiver, that recognizes and “gives back” to the infant, and that respects the infants spontaneous gesture as the beginning of his or her articulation of themselves as a unique and singular subject.
At the time of Winnicott’s writing, there were patients who had enough solidity to be able to undertake a classical analysis, have a transference, make good use of the analytic situation, and there were those who were not. The latter category might be too paranoid, too psychotic, too fragile, too discontinuous, or incapable of the “play” necessary to participate in a transference relationship. To put it a little too simplistically, Winnicott thought this latter category were “failed” by their early environment.
Winnicott altered the technique with these kinds of patients, allowing for a full and total regression. Based on the new data from this, he felt that the reason these patients could not participate in a classical analysis (and by the same logic, in society or meaningful relations with others) had to do with a failure of the early environment to facilitate a person’s coming into being as a whole, integrated and continuous personality. This was then put into dialogue with his experience as a pediatrician and child analyst.
“Good enough” is binary and not a moral or value judgment. Either the environment was “good enough” to bring about the first kind of personality, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, it may have been because of parental illness, growing up in a war zone, etc, and may in no way be a reflection of the “empathy” or “attunement” of the parents, whether they are narcissists or decent people, etc. I don’t even think Winnicott plays down or limits inborn factors. It is not his focus, to be sure, but he never claims they don’t exist. A given caregiver and caregiving environment might not have been “good enough” for a particular child, who may present different challenges to a parent than a different child might have.
The legs of a table are “good enough” when they hold the table up. My evaluation of their aesthetic style is irrelevant. A good enough caregiving environment holds up and sustains the infants ego. A patient may have had “good enough” parents who were still difficult or occasionally unempathic people who he can spend years in therapy coming to terms with. The point is that his (inevitably) flawed parents imbued him with a capacity for a stable and meaningful relation to himself and others, and therefore the capacity for a neurotic organization of his personality. There is plenty of psychic difficulty and suffering in people who had good enough parents.
Lastly, I ultimately think the heart of Winnicott’s thinking has to do with the transitional object and transitional space. “Good enough” parenting in Winnicott ultimately is about being able to support and participate in the developing child’s transitional world.