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36 Ibid., p. 167.
37 D.W. Winnicott, Human Nature
(Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel,
1988), p. 131.
38 D.W. Winnicott, Through
Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis
(London: Karnac, 1984), p. 99.
39 Winnicott, Human Nature,
p. 103.
40 Ibid., p. 102.
Kohut makes a final observation that is worth noting. He found that it makes little
difference who the early parental provider is, as long as she or he provides the
appropriate empathic response for the child’s development. He referenced an example,
reported by Anna Freud and Sophie Dann, to emphasize the point that a biological
mother is not essential to providing the necessary empathic environment to nourish
the child’s developmental process. Freud and Dann related the story of six children
who had survived a German concentration camp in World War II. Over the course of
their three years of imprisonment, they were taken care of by an ever-changing set
of mothers. As each set of mother surrogates was exterminated, others took their
place, until their own deaths. Although the children were justifiably disturbed by the
experience, they had a reasonably cohesive self, which can only be attributed to the
empathic regard and affection they were given by the many women who took care
of them.36
While Fairbairn and Kohut mounted a full frontal assault on Freud’s theory of human
nature, another of their contemporaries, Donald Winnicott, a pediatrician by background,
launched a more subtle but no less effective attack based on his decades
of work with infants. Winnicott challenged the very notion of the self-absorbed little
individual who views the world as so much bounty to feed its insatiable appetites.
Winnicott argued that the idea of an individual baby, per se, is a mis nomer. Babies
don’t exist on their own. They don’t even have a coher ent sense of self. “At this very
early stage,” says Winnicott, “it is not logical to think in terms of an individual …
because there is not yet an individual self there.”37 Although considered counter
intuitive at the time – but rather obvious with hindsight – Winnicott was making an
insightful point; that while a baby is formed in the womb, an individual is formed
in a relationship.
If you show me a baby you certainly show me also someone caring for a baby, or at
least a pram with someone’s eyes and ears glued to it. One sees a “nursing couple.”38
What Winnicott is saying is that a relationship precedes an indi vidual, not the other
way around. In other words, individuals don’t create society. Rather, society creates
individuals. This simple observa tion challenged the very core of modernity, with its
emphasis on the self-contained, autonomous individual exerting its will on the world.
Winnicott drove his thesis home with a telling account of a baby’s first glimmer of
self-consciousness. He asks us to consider the overriding importance of the baby’s
first act … finding his mother’s nipple. From his years of pediatric experience, Winnicott
observed that the way the baby is introduced to his mother’s nipple sets the course
for the child’s future development as an individual being. Because this initial act is
also the baby’s very first initiation into a relationship with another being, the way the
relationship is entered into is determinative of the kind of expec tations – or lack of
expectations – a child develops regarding others.
In the very first feed, says Winnicott, the mother must allow the baby to find the
nipple, making the experience a playful present and, more important, giving the
baby the sense – although dimly perceived – that he has created the nipple and, by
doing so is “creating the world.”39 What is going on here, observes Winnicott, is that
“[t]he mother is waiting to be discovered.”40 This marks the beginning of the baby’s
first relationship and guides his development to selfhood. It is through this creative
act that the sense of “I” and “thou” later develops. Win nicott sums up the importance
of the first feed.
Memories are built up from innumerable sense-impressions associated with the
activity of feeding and of finding the object. In the course of time there comes a