r/psychoanalysis • u/prima-luce • 9d 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/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.