Freud’s concept of the unconscious is essential to appreciate that the antisocial act conveys an important message to society, (Location 147)
antisocial tendency is an important aspect of normal emotional development. (Location 148)
at one stage or another, we have all felt deprived and may have been delinquent (Location 149)
For Winnicott the privileged child could feel as deprived as the under-privileged child. What was key to the child’s development was having ‘… confidence in father and mother (Location 153)
Winnicott would be in 5× weekly analysis with James Strachey for the next ten years. He qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1934 and a year later became the first man to qualify as a Child Analyst. (Location 172)
The hallmark of Winnicott’s extensions of Sigmund Freud’s original formulations is his theory of emotional development that focuses on the infant’s earliest experience of his parents – the parent–infant relationship. The parent’s part of this relationship – the ‘environmental factors’ – contributes to the infant’s developing internal world. Enormous stress is laid on the mother’s capacity to identify with her infant’s helplessness, which means that she is able to adapt to the baby’s early needs. This specialized form of the mother’s identification Winnicott named ‘primary maternal preoccupation.’ The father’s role during this particular phase of the infant’s life is to allow and facilitate the mother and infant to live this intense experience together. Later on, anything from 4–9 months onwards, the father will come into his own as the infant begins to discern the difference between mother and father. Later still, from 9 months up to about 2, part of the father’s role is to separate the mother and baby because the developing child has to recognize his position in relation to mummy and daddy. Oedipal issues need to be processed. The parents who work well together through their enjoyment of each other and family life simultaneously recognize the need for boundaries and space in the evolution of the family. These factors will best facilitate their infant’s normal development. The continuity of parental care, especially concentrated in the early years, is an essential factor for the growing child’s mental health and its value never diminishes. Good enough parenting throughout the child’s upbringing will mean that there is a good chance that the late adolescent will be able to leave home and move on appropriately. (Location 176)
At the beginning of his psychoanalytic training Winnicott not only realized that the baby was a human being but also that ‘there’s no such thing as an infant’. He wrote, ‘… if you show me a baby you certainly show me someone caring for the baby …’. He termed the mother–baby unit the ‘environment– individual set-up’ and defined this phase as the time of ‘absolute dependence’. Winnicott increasingly understood that psychoanalysis is a study of human nature and, rather than focus on psychopathology, he was interested in normal development. This approach led to his understanding that the ‘failure’ of the early environment causes the baby to experience a ‘break in the continuity of being’. This will occur because of a mother who is not able to identify with her infant – due to depression and/or unfortunate circumstances – which subsequently exposes the infant to trauma and possible mental illness later on. The earlier the environmental failure – evidenced from his clinical work with families and adults in analysis – the more catastrophic the result in the long term. This means that psychopathology is a consequence of early parental failure. (Location 208)
Winnicott once said that ‘delinquency was a sign of hope’ – a characteristically paradoxical statement. He meant that the unconscious hope behind the delinquent act was that the environment would appreciate the (unconscious) message and thus the offender could re-find the lost good parents. (Location 221)
Winnicott’s theory of the antisocial tendency is linked with his formulations on human aggression. Freud’s account in 1920 posits a ‘death instinct’ that was innate and silent. Melanie Klein developed this notion and defined the death instinct as innate envy, sadism and hate in the newborn. Although there is a distinction between Freud’s concept and Klein’s elaboration, Winnicott evidently disagreed with both. For him aggression in the newborn is simply ‘… a symptom of being alive’. (Location 230)
Sadism, envy and hate are developmental achievements, Winnicott states, and belong to a later stage of emotional development. (Location 235)
Firm boundaries are equally as important as enough space. Too many boundaries restrict and suffocate whereas too much space can lead to a sense of loneliness and helplessness related to a deprivation of attention. Good family life, in and of itself, facilitates growth. The replication of this model in residential care, as Winnicott shows, is equivalent to therapeutic treatment (p. 49). (Location 259)
We are shown how an in-depth consultation with an attuned psychoanalytic clinician can offer a real opportunity for a new beginning because the symptom is no longer required (p. 222). Once it has come to light in the context of the therapeutic consultation it can be processed and understood. The child feels heard. (Location 268)
Although the circumstances in which Winnicott found himself were abnormal because of the war time, the knowledge gained from the experience has general application because deprived children who become delinquent have basic problems which are manifested in predictable ways whatever the circumstances. (Location 298)
The evacuation experience had a profound effect on Winnicott because he had to meet in a concentrated way the confusion brought about by the wholesale break-up of family life, and he had to experience the effect of separation and loss, and of destruction and death. (Location 304)
From among much research done on this subject a recent investigation carried out by one of us at the London Child Guidance Clinic may be quoted. It showed that one important external factor in the causation of persistent delinquency is a small child’s prolonged separation from his mother. Over half of a statistically valid series of cases investigated had suffered periods of separation from their mothers and familiar environment lasting six months or more during their first 5 years of life. Study of individual case histories confirmed the statistical inference that the separation was the outstanding aetiological factor in these cases. Apart from such a gross abnormality as chronic delinquency, mild behaviour disorders, anxiety, and a tendency to vague physical illness can often be traced to such disturbances of the little child’s environment, and most mothers of small children recognize this by being unwilling to leave their little children for more than very short periods. (Location 443)
The capacity to experience and express sadness marks a stage in the development of a child’s personality and capacity for social relationships. (Location 458)
The subject is a big one, but certain things stand out clearly, one of which would be that the younger the child the more danger there is in separating him from his mother. There are two ways of stating this which at first appear to be very different from each other. One is that the younger the child the less his ability to keep the idea of a person alive in himself; that is to say, unless he sees that person or has tangible evidence of her existence within x minutes, hours or days, that person is for him dead. (Location 473)
Depressive people of any age characteristically find it difficult to keep alive the idea of those whom they love, even perhaps when they are living in the same room with them. (Location 481)
The thing which struck her most was that when she came he did not know her. This was distressing to him and a real shock to her, but she patiently waited and in the morning was rewarded by his being able to recognize her. (Location 556)
He was very happy to be home, and slept well the first night. The next night he slept less well and this sleeplessness increased gradually to a serious symptom. (Location 562)
The degree of this symptom eventually brought the mother to me. He would stand up and scream for four hours, the screaming got beyond anger to terror and beyond terror to despair. (Location 564)
The only way she could manage was to nurse him until he slept, but even if she got him soundly asleep, if she got up to go he always woke as she reached the door. (Location 567)
After half an hour she went in and found him in an awful state, flushed and wet and incontinent of faeces. This developed into sobbing until eventually he sunk into his mother’s arms and slept worn out. In an hour or two the tussle started again. (Location 570)
The mother said she felt in despair, she felt as if all her training of the child had gone to the wind. If she smacked his head and said ‘naughty’ he smacked himself, seeming to say that he knew all about it anyway and she need not rub it in, and he had taken to grinding his teeth. (Location 580)
Investigation showed that Eddie could not easily meet his mother again because in the time of separation from her he had hated her without being able to get from her presence and smile the reassurance that she could remain alive and friendly in spite of his hate. The fact that the trouble was resolved with help does not alter the other fact that the child did not easily recover from the trauma of separation from his mother. Without in any way denying that physical harm may come to children in air raids, and without minimizing the harm that may result from their witnessing fear in grown-ups, or actual destruction, one can usefully go on putting forward the commonplace that there is more in the family unit than considerations of comfort and convenience. In fact the family unit provides a reassurance that the infant cannot really do without, and the toddler cannot miss it without interference with his emotional development and without impoverishment of his personality and character. (Location 582)
‘This, then, is our broadest and most general conclusion, namely, that the first great scheme for evacuation might have been far less of a failure, far more of a success, if it had been planned with more understanding of human nature, of the way in which ordinary parents and ordinary children feel and are likely to behave. ‘In especial, the strength of the family tie, on the one hand, and the need for skilled understanding of the individual child, on the other, seem to have lain too far outside the ken of those responsible for the Scheme.’(p. 9.) ‘… it is extravagant not to provide personal service to which individuals can turn for understanding and help.’ (p. 155.) ‘This sharp lesson in the ineffectiveness and waste of a partial approach to a great human issue, one which from its very nature touches every side of human life, applies by no means only to the temporary crisis of dispersing urban populations during a war.’(p. 11.) (Location 607)
Tiny children are only indirectly affected by war. They are scarcely wakened from sleep by guns. The worst effects come from separation from familiar sights and smells, and perhaps from mother, and from loss of contact with father, things which often cannot be avoided. They may however come into contact with mother’s body more than they would ordinarily do, and sometimes they have to know what mother feels like when she is scared. (Location 651)
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A child in this age group does not understand the idea of a fight for freedom, and indeed could be expected to see a great deal of virtue in what a Fascist or Nazi regime is supposed to provide, in which someone who is idealised controls and directs. This is what is happening inside the child’s own nature at this age, and such a child would be liable to feel that freedom meant licence. In the majority of schools the stress would be laid on the Empire, the parts coloured red in the maps of the world, and it is not easy to show why children in the latency period of emotional development should not be allowed to idealise (since idealise they must) their own country and kind. (Location 665)
Children who are really coming to grips with puberty and the new ideas which belong to that period, who are finding a new capacity for the enjoyment of personal responsibility, and who are beginning to cope with an increased potential for destruction and construction, may find some help in war and war news. The point is that grown-ups are more honest in wartime than in peacetime. Even those who cannot acknowledge personal responsibility for this war mostly do show that they can hate and fight. (Location 687)
In wartime we are all as bad and as good as the adolescent in his dreams, and this reassures him. (Location 692)
The adolescent, therefore, may be expected to enjoy actual war bulletins as given to adults, which he can take or leave as he pleases. He may hate them, but by then he knows what it is we are so eager about, and this clears his conscience when he discovers that he has himself the capacity to enjoy wars and cruelty as they turn up in his fantasy. (Location 695)
Without attempting to distinguish between well and ill, one can say that children can often be grouped according to the particular tendency or difficulty they can be seen to be contending with. (Location 705)
Every one knows that the child is concerned with a personal world, which is only to a limited extent conscious, and which requires a deal of managing. The child deals with personal wars within his or her own breast, and if his outward demeanour is in conformity with civilised standards this is only the result of a big and constant struggle. Those who forget this are repeatedly bewildered by evidences of breakdown of this civilised superstructure, and by unexpectedly fierce reactions to quite simple events. (Location 727)
It is sometimes imagined that children would not think of war if it were not put into their heads. But any one who takes the trouble to find out what goes on beneath the surface of a child’s mind can discover for himself that the child already knows about greed, hate, and cruelty, as about love and remorse, and the urge to make good, and about sadness. Little children understand the words good and bad very well, and it is of no value to say that to them these ideas are only in fantasy, since their imaginary world can seem more real to them than the external world. I must make it clear at this point that I am talking of largely unconscious fantasy, and not of fantasying or day-dreaming, or consciously operated story-making. (Location 731)
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it is a well-known human characteristic to become flippant under threat of a grief that cannot be tolerated. (Location 764)
A mother can be surprisingly sensitive to criticism; so powerful is the latent sense of guilt about the possession of children (or of anything valuable, for that matter) that the idea of evacuation first tends to make a mother unsure of herself and willing to do whatever she is told, regardless of her own feelings. One can almost hear her saying, ‘Yes, of course, take them away, I was never worthy of them: air raids are not the only danger, it is my own self that fails to provide them with the home they ought to have.’ It will be understood that she does not consciously feel all this, she only feels confused or stunned. (Location 769)
It is, however, the purpose of this article to point out that however much the authorities may attempt to make rules and regulations intended to be of general application, evacuation remains a matter of a million individual human problems, each different from the others, and each urgently important to someone. As an example, a mother may herself be a student of evacuation problems, and in touch with all its many difficulties, yet she will not be helped by such knowledge to tolerate loss of contact with her own child. (Location 791)
A mother is expected to dislike any one who neglects her child, but she might quite as reasonably be expected to dislike any one who looks after her child better than she does herself; for such good care rouses her envy or jealousy. It is her own child and, quite simply, she wants to be her own child’s mother. (Location 817)
is not difficult to imagine what happens. A child comes home on holiday and quickly senses an atmosphere of tension when asked some detail. ‘Did Mrs. So-and-so give you a glass of milk before bed?’ The child may be relieved to be able to answer ‘No’ and so to please mother without dissembling. The child is in a conflict of loyalties and is puzzled. Which is better, home or away? In some cases the defence against this very conflict has been prepared by a refusal of food at the billet during the first and last days there. If the mother shows quite a lot of relief the child is tempted to add a few details imaginatively. (Location 820)
The difficult situation arises from two sources; the child feels it would be disloyal to report happiness and good feeding, and the mother nurses a hope that the foster-mother compares unfavourably with herself. (Location 827)
This may all seem very unreasonable to the outsider, who can afford to be reasonable, but logic (or reasoning that denies the existence or importance of unconscious feelings and conflicts) is not enough when a mother has her child taken from her. (Location 831)
Nothing is so likely to arouse jealousy in the mother as the provision of exceptional care. (Location 836)
When a relation or a friend is indulgent to a child the mother suffers by being forced into the role of strict and even cruel parent, and the home situation is frequently eased when a child meets firmness elsewhere. (Location 845)
An important thing to be reckoned with is that a mother not only wants children, she also needs them. In setting out to bring up a family she organises her anxieties, as well as her interests, so as to be able to mobilise as much as possible of her emotional drive to that one end. She finds value in being continuously bothered by her children’s crying needs, and this holds good even if she openly complains of her family ties as a nuisance. (Location 853)
She may never have given thought to this aspect of her motherhood experience until, when the children have gone, she first finds herself the possessor of a quiet kitchen, the captain of a vessel with no crew. Even if her personality has sufficient flexibility to allow her to adjust to such a new situation, this changeover of interests requires time. (Location 857)
In the ordinary way a mother gradually accustoms herself to new interests as the children grow up, but mothers are asked in the present time of war to accomplish this difficult process in a few weeks. It is not to be wondered at that they often fail, either becoming depressed, or else illogically insisting on the children’s return. (Location 863)
I think that the point is that if you make a home for a child you provide a little bit of the world that the child can understand and can believe in, in moments when love fails. (Location 912)
So I think we can assume that if you have kept your evacuee for a long time you have taken the child into your home, which is such a different thing from letting him into your house, and the child has responded and has used your home as a home. (Location 917)
Many children settled in and seemed to present no problem at all, but perhaps more can be learned from the difficulties than from the easy successes. For instance, I should say that the child who settled in right away, and who never seemed to worry about home at all, was not necessarily in a good way. There could easily be an unnatural acceptance of the new conditions, and in some cases this lack of home-sickness proved in the end to be a snare and a delusion. It is so very natural for a child to feel that his own home is best, and that his own mother’s cooking is the only good cooking. More usually you found the child in your care took a long time, perhaps a very long time, to settle in. I am suggesting that this was good. Time had to be taken. (Location 932)
A child has only a limited capacity for keeping alive the idea of someone who is loved when there is no opportunity for seeing and talking to that person, and that is where the real trouble lies. For days or even weeks all is well, and then the child finds he cannot feel that his mother is real, or else he keeps on having the idea that father or brothers or sisters are coming to harm in some way. This is the idea in his mind. He has dreams with all sorts of frightening struggles which point to the very intense conflicts in his mind. Worse than that, after a while he may find that he has no strong feelings at all. All his life he has had live love feelings, and he has come to rely on them, taking them for granted, being buoyed up by them. Suddenly, in a strange land, he finds himself without the support of any live feelings at all, and he is terrified by this. He does not know he will recover if he can wait. Perhaps there is some teddy or doll or piece of clothing rescued from the home towards which he continues to have some feelings, and this then becomes tremendously important to him. (Location 944)
In evacuation, children have just had to endure these distressing periods of doubt and uncertainty, being unable to go home, and it must be remembered that they were not just away at a sort of boarding-school, coming home for holidays. They had to find a new home away from home. (Location 954)
If one recognises the distress that underlies these symptoms one easily sees how futile it must be to punish a child for them; a better treatment always lies at hand, namely, to help the child by your demonstrative love and imaginative understanding. (Location 958)
Up to this point the child had been getting to know you, and had been using your house, eating your food. He now looked to you for love and for the feeling that he was loved. In your new position with the child you were not only the person who worked for him, but you were also there to understand him and to help him to keep alive the memory of his own people. You were also there to receive his attempts to give you back something for what you were doing, and you were needed to protect the child in his frightening relationship to the rather strange world around and at school, where the other children were not always friendly. Sooner or later, I suppose, he gained the necessary confidence in the house and the home, and the way you ran it, to enable him to take it for granted, and then, at last, became like one of the family, a village child with the village children, even talking in the local dialect. Many even came to gain through their experiences, but this came as a climax to a complex series of events, and there were many points at which there might have been failure. (Location 963)
I have said that there is a limit to the ability of a child to keep alive the idea of someone he loves without contact with that person. The same can be said of parents too, and of every human being to some extent. Mothers had almost as much difficulty as their children in this respect. They soon began to feel doubts about their children, to have feelings that they were in danger, or that they were ill or sad or even being ill-treated, quite apart from any justification for thinking these things. It is quite natural for people to need to see and be near those whom they love, or else to worry about them. In the ordinary course of events, with the children at home, when a mother is worried she can just call out, or can wait till the next meal time, and the child she is worried about comes up and gives her a reassuring kiss. Close contact between people has its use, and when it is suddenly broken up people (children or adults) have to suffer fears and doubts, and to go on suffering till recovery occurs. Recovery means that in time the mother ceases to feel responsible for her child, at any rate to a large extent. That is the hateful thing about it: evacuation forced parents to give up their concern for their own children. (Location 1009)
What I want to say now is that when the children come home they are not necessarily going to fall into and fit nicely into the holes they made when they went away, for the simple reason that the hole has disappeared. Mother and child will have become able to manage without each other, and when they meet they will have to start from scratch to get to know each other. This process must take time, and time must be allowed. It is no use mother rushing up to the child and throwing her arms round his neck without looking to see whether he is going to be able to respond sincerely. They can be brutally sincere, can children, and coldness can hurt. Given time, on the other hand, feelings can develop in their natural way, and suddenly a mother may be rewarded by a genuine hug that was worth waiting for. The home is still the child’s home, and I think he will be glad to be there in the course of time, if mother can wait. (Location 1029)
During the period of waiting there may be complaints. It must always seem to a mother that when her child makes complaints he is making a comparison between her and the foster-parents. A child shows by his tone of voice that he is disappointed in something. I think it is well to remember that usually he is not comparing home with the foster-home so much as comparing home as he finds it with that which he had built up in his mind while he was away. In a period of separation a good deal of idealisation goes on, and this is the more true the more complete the disunion. (Location 1043)
find that boys and girls who have such bad homes that they have to be given care and protection quite regularly imagine they have an absolutely wonderful home somewhere, if only they could find it. That is the main reason why they tend to run away. They are trying to find home. Do you see that while one of the functions of a real home is to provide something positive in the child’s life, another function is to correct the child’s picture by showing the limitations of reality? When the child comes home with his rather fantastic expectations he has to suffer disillusionment at the same time as he rediscovers that he really has a home of his own. Again, all this takes time. (Location 1047)
A little boy I know is 9 years old, and he has spent a great deal of his young life away from his London home. When he heard about the return of the evacuees because of the end of the war, he started thinking things out, getting used to the idea and making plans. Suddenly he announced, ‘When I am home in London I shall get up early every morning and milk the cows.’ (Location 1073)
The most exciting thing of all, according to my way of thinking, is that at meal-times these children run into their own homes to eat meals prepared by their own mothers. The meal at home means so much, both to the mother who takes the trouble to get the food and to prepare it, and to the children who eat it. And then there is the evening bath, or bedtime story, and the good-night kiss; all these things are private and we do not see them, but we are not ignorant. This is the stuff of which home is made. (Location 1087)
The wide world is a fine place for grown-ups looking for an escape from boredom, but ordinarily children are not bored, and they can have all the feelings they can stand feeling inside their own house, or within a few minutes from the doorstep. (Location 1092)
And by home, you know, I do not mean a lovely house with all the modern conveniences. By home I mean the room or two that has become associated in the child’s mind with mother and father, and the other children, and the cat. And there is the shelf or cupboard where the toys are kept. (Location 1098)
By home I mean the room or two that has become associated in the child’s mind with mother and father, and the other children, and the cat. And there is the shelf or cupboard where the toys are kept. (Location 1098)
it is the actual reassurance provided by the home itself that frees the child to play, and in other ways to enjoy his ability to enrich the world out of his own head. (Location 1101)
At the same time, I am not at all happy about the ideas that come into the child’s mind about home when he is away from it for a long time. When he is home, he really knows what home is like, and because of this he is free to pretend it is anything he wants it to be for the purposes of his play. And play is not just pleasure – it is essential to his well-being. When he is away, on the other hand, he has no chance to know from minute to minute what his home is like, and so his ideas lose touch with reality in a way that easily frightens him. (Location 1104)
When he is home, he really knows what home is like, and because of this he is free to pretend it is anything he wants it to be for the purposes of his play. And play is not just pleasure – it is essential to his well-being. When he is away, on the other hand, he has no chance to know from minute to minute what his home is like, and so his ideas lose touch with reality in a way that easily frightens him. (Location 1105)
If you are upset when your child complains that home is not as good as he expected it to be, you can rest assured it is not as bad either. If this is true, you will see how much more free a child is when he is home than when he is away. His home-coming can open up a new era of freedom of thought and imagination, provided he can take time to get to feel that what is real is real. This does take time, and you must allow for a slow dawning of confidence. (Location 1112)
His home-coming can open up a new era of freedom of thought and imagination, provided he can take time to get to feel that what is real is real. This does take time, and you must allow for a slow dawning of confidence. (Location 1113)
The child has had to be his own strict mother and father while away, and you may be sure that he has had to be over-strict with himself to be on the safe side, unless he has failed to stand the strain, and has got into trouble in his billet. Now, however, at home with you, he will be able to take holidays from self-control, for the simple reason that he will leave the business of control to you. Some children have been living in artificial and over-done self-control for years, and it can be assumed that when they begin to let mother take over control once more they are going to be a bit of a nuisance from time to time. (Location 1120)
am sure that, by and large, a child’s home, however simple, is more valuable to that boy or girl than any other place to live in. (Location 1130)
It is not just the food and shelter that counts, and not even the provision of occupations for spare moments, though, heaven knows, these things are sufficiently important. They may be provided in abundance, and yet the essential must be missing if a child’s own parents or adoptive parents or guardians are not the people taking responsibility for his development. There is the matter which I have mentioned of the need for holidays from self-control. Shall I say that, for a child to be brought up so that he can discover the deepest part of his nature, someone has to be defied, and even at times hated, and who but the child’s own parents can be in a position to be hated without there being a danger of a complete break in the relationship? (Location 1131)
Their return means that your life will be richer, but less your own. (Location 1143)
You will have to be able to be strong in your attitude towards the children, as well as understanding and loving, and if you are going to be strong eventually you may as well start strong. It is rather unfair suddenly to develop strength when it is late, when the child has already begun to test you and try you for reliability. (Location 1148)
In all work that concerns the care of human beings it is the worker with originality and a live sense of responsibility that is needed. When, as in this task, the human beings are children, children who lack an environment specifically adapted to their individual needs, then the worker who loves to follow a rigid plan is unqualified for the task. Any large plan for the care of children deprived of adequate home life must, therefore, be of a type which allows for the fullest degree of local adaptation, and which attracts free-minded people to work it. (Location 1186)
The billeting breakdowns arising in these ways quickly degenerated into cases of antisocial behaviour. A child who did not do well in a billet either went home and to danger, or else changed billet; several changes of billet indicated a degenerating situation, and tended to be the prelude to some antisocial act. It was at this stage that public opinion became an important factor in the situation: on the one hand there was public alarm, and the activities of courts which represented the usual attitudes towards delinquency, while on the other there was the organising concern of the Ministry of Health, with the developing local interest in providing, for these children, an alternative management designed to prevent their reaching the courts. (Location 1194)
It was quickly discovered that the symptom-pictures were diagnostically useless, and were merely evidence of distress as a result of ecological failure in the new foster-home. Psychological illness, in the sense of deep endopsychic disturbance apparently unrelated to the current environment, could hardly be recognised as such in the abnormal conditions of evacuation. (Location 1203)
The initial reaction of the authorities to the emergence of a problem-group of children was to give such children individual psychological treatment, and to provide facilities where they could be placed while receiving treatment. Gradually, however, it became clear that success in providing accommodation of this kind demanded residential management. It emerged, moreover, that such management in itself constituted a therapy. (Location 1207)
By a primary home experience is meant experience of an environment adapted to the special needs of the infant and the little child, without which the foundations of mental health cannot be laid down. Without someone specifically orientated to his needs the infant cannot find a working relation to external reality. Without someone to give satisfactory instinctual gratifications the infant cannot find his body, nor can he develop an integrated personality. Without one person to love and to hate he cannot come to know that it is the same person that he loves and hates, and so cannot find his sense of guilt, and his desire to repair and restore. Without a limited human and physical environment that he can know he cannot find out the extent to which his aggressive ideas actually fail to destroy, and so cannot sort out the difference between fantasy and fact. Without a father and mother who are together, and who take joint responsibility for him, he cannot find and express his urge to separate them, nor experience relief at failing to do so. The emotional development of the first years is complex and cannot be skipped over, and every infant absolutely needs a certain degree of favourable environment if he is to negotiate the essential first stages of this development. (Location 1227)
Winnicott came to see it as characteristic of the antisocial child that he has no area in the personality for playing: this is replaced by acting out. (Location 1580)
Winnicott’s greater emphasis on the importance of the human environment (particularly the mother) in meeting and nourishing the innate tendency in the child towards concern. This is especially relevant in the present context because Winnicott believed that it is at the time when the capacity for concern is developing – roughly from 6 months to 2 years of age – that deprivation or loss can have particularly devastating consequences: the beginnings of the process of socialization arising from the child’s innate tendencies can be lost or dammed up. (Location 1588)
Winnicott gives his view that the earliest and fiercest morality lies in not betraying the self. (Location 1593)
in the infant there is love and hate of full human intensity. (Location 1619)
Of all human tendencies aggression, in particular, is hidden, disguised, side-tracked, ascribed to outside agencies, and when it appears it is always a difficult task to trace it to its origins. (Location 1623)
the aggressive behaviour of children that comes to the attention of a teacher is never a matter solely of emergence of primitive aggressive instincts. No useful theory of childhood aggressiveness can be built on such a false premise. (Location 1638)
The usual story is that in the course of two or three hundred feeds they bite less than a dozen times. And they bite chiefly when they are excited, and not chiefly when frustrated! An infant I know, who was born with a lower incisor already cut, and so could have torn the nipple badly, actually suffered partial starvation himself through protecting the breast from damage. Instead of biting the breast the baby chewed on the inside of his lower lip, causing a sore. It seems that as soon as we admit that the infant can, and has the urge to, hurt, we must admit the existence of an inhibition of aggressive urges making for protection of what is loved and is therefore in danger. Already, soon after birth, infants are unalike in the degree to which they show or hide direct expression of feelings, and it is of some comfort to mothers of angry, screaming babies that the other mother’s nice docile infant who sleeps when not fed, and feeds when not asleep, is not necessarily laying down any better foundations for mental health than her own child is doing. It is evidently of value to the developing infant that he has frequently experienced rage at an age when he need not feel remorse. To be angry for the first time at eighteen months must be truly terrifying for the child. (Location 1672)
Perhaps the word greed conveys more easily than any other the idea of original fusion of love and aggression, though the love here is confined to mouth-love. (Location 1687)
So far I think we have described three things. Firstly there is a theoretical greed or primary appetite-love, which can be cruel, hurting, dangerous, but which is so by chance. The infant’s aim is gratification, peace of mind and body. Gratification brings peace, but the infant perceives that to become gratified he endangers what he loves. Normally he compromises, and allows himself enough gratification while not allowing himself to be too dangerous. But to some extent he frustrates himself; so he must hate some part of himself, unless he can find someone outside himself to frustrate him and to bear being hated. (Location 1688)
infancia experiencia ambivalencia satisfacción psicoanálisis
Without attempting to go deeply into the origin of the forces that contend for mastery within the personality, I can point out that when the cruel or destructive forces there threaten to dominate over the loving, the individual has to do something to save himself, and one thing he does is to turn himself inside out, to dramatise the inner world outside, to act the destructive role himself and to bring about control by external authority. Control can be established in this way, in the dramatised fantasy, without serious damping down of instincts, whereas the alternative, control within, would need to be generally applied, and would result in a state of affairs known clinically as depression. (Location 1708)
a boy boxing or kicking a football feels better for what he is doing, partly because he has enjoyed hitting and kicking, and partly because he unconsciously feels (falsely) that he has driven badness out of his fists and feet. (Location 1729)
‘Why not tell him that you know that when he steals he is not wanting the things that he steals but he is looking for something that he has a right to: that he is making a claim on his mother and father because he feels deprived of their love.’ (Location 2276)
The antisocial tendency is not a diagnosis. It does not compare directly with other diagnostic terms such as neurosis and psychosis. The antisocial tendency may be found in a normal individual, or in one that is neurotic or psychotic. (Location 2298)
The antisocial tendency is characterized by an element in it which compels the environment to be important. The patient through unconscious drives compels someone to attend to management. It is the task of the therapist to become involved in this the patient’s unconscious drive, and the work is done by the therapist in terms of management, tolerance, and understanding. (Location 2311)
The antisocial tendency implies hope. Lack of hope is the basic feature of the deprived child who, of course, is not all the time being antisocial. In the period of hope the child manifests an antisocial tendency. (Location 2314)
the treatment of the antisocial tendency is not psychoanalysis but management, a going to meet and match the moment of hope. (Location 2320)
There is a direct relationship between the antisocial tendency and deprivation. (Location 2322)
When there is an antisocial tendency there has been a true deprivation (not a simple privation); that is to say, there has been a loss of something good that has been positive in the child’s experience up to a certain date,1 and that has been withdrawn; the withdrawal has extended over a period of time longer than that over which the child can keep the memory of the experience alive. The comprehensive statement of deprivation is one that includes both the early and the late, both the pinpoint trauma and the sustained traumatic condition and also both the near-normal and the clearly abnormal. (Location 2325)
Bowlby needs Klein’s intricate statement that is built round the understanding of melancholia, and that derives from Freud and Abraham, but it is also true that psychoanalysis needs Bowlby’s emphasis on deprivation, if psychoanalysis is ever to come to terms with this special subject of the antisocial tendency. (Location 2337)
psicoanálisis apego antisocial
There are always two trends in the antisocial tendency although the accent is sometimes more on one than on the other. One trend is represented typically in stealing, and the other in destructiveness. By one trend the child is looking for something, somewhere, and failing to find it seeks it elsewhere, when hopeful. By the other the child is seeking that amount of environmental stability which will stand the strain resulting from impulsive behaviour. This is a search for an environmental provision that has been lost, a human attitude which, because it can be relied on, gives freedom to the individual to move and to act and to get excited. (Location 2340)
It is particularly because of the second of these trends that the child provokes total environmental reactions, as if seeking an ever-widening frame, a circle which had as its first example the mother’s arms or the mother’s body. One can discern a series – the mother’s body, the mother’s arms, the parental relationship, the home, the family including cousins and near relations, the school, the locality with its police-stations, the country with its laws. (Location 2345)
The child who steals an object is not looking for the object stolen but seeks the mother over whom he or she has rights. These rights derive from the fact that (from the child’s point of view) the mother was created by the child. The mother met the child’s primary creativity, and so became the object that the child was ready to find. (Location 2352)
When there is at the time of the original deprivation some fusion of aggressive (or motility) roots with the libidinal the child claims the mother by a mixture of stealing and hurting and messing, according to the specific details of that child’s emotional developmental state. When there is less fusion the child’s object-seeking and aggression are more separated off from each other, and there is a greater degree of dissociation in the child. This leads to the proposition that the nuisance value of the antisocial child is an essential feature, and is also, at its best, a favourable feature indicating again a potentiality for recovery of lost fusion of the libidinal and motility drives. (Location 2359)
The manifestation of the antisocial tendency includes stealing and lying, incontinence and the making of a mess generally. Although each symptom has its specific meaning and value, the common factor for my purpose in my attempt to describe the antisocial tendency is the nuisance value of the symptoms. This nuisance value is exploited by the child, and is not a chance affair. Much of the motivation is unconscious, but not necessarily all. (Location 2368)
A very common antisocial symptom is greediness, with the closely related inhibition of appetite. If we study greediness we shall find the deprived complex. In other words, if an infant is greedy there is some degree of deprivation and some compulsion towards seeking for a therapy in respect of this deprivation through the environment. (Location 2374)
The greediness is part of the infant’s compulsion to seek for a cure from the mother who caused the deprivation. This greediness is antisocial; it is the precursor of stealing, and it can be met and cured by the mother’s therapeutic adaptation, so easily mistaken for spoiling. (Location 2388)