The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment
The good-enough mother, the true and false self, and the holding environment.
Thus the basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of being alone while someone else is present.
Published in 1965, this volume gathers the papers Winnicott wrote between 1957 and 1963, the years in which his clinical thinking reached full form. Its organising claim is that emotional development depends not on the infant alone but on a facilitating environment that adapts to need, and that psychotic-level disturbance traces to failures in that early provision. Across the chapters Winnicott sets out the theory of the parent-infant relationship, the movement from absolute to relative dependence, and the conditions under which ego integration and the capacity to be alone become possible. The good-enough mother appears not as an ideal but as an ordinary devotion whose graduated failure hands the infant back its own agency. The papers on the true and false self describe how a compliant surface forms when the environment cannot meet the spontaneous gesture. For the clinician, the collection supplies a developmental grammar for reading regression, dependence, and the management of holding inside the transference.
About the author
Donald Woods Winnicott
Donald Winnicott (1896 to 1971) was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who spent four decades at Paddington Green Children's Hospital and twice served as President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He belonged to the Independent group. His work locates development in the facilitating environment provided by the good-enough mother, whose ordinary care lets the infant's true self emerge rather than a compliant false self. Transitional objects and potential space name the intermediate area where play, illusion and cultural life take hold.
Details
- 1965
- English
- Routledge
- Routledge, 1965
- 296
- 9780946439843