Winnicott is concerned with the springs of imaginative living and of cultural experience in every sense, with whatever determines an individual's capacity to live creatively and to find life worth living.

Playing and Reality

Attachment--and loss.

* Caring for children * The origins of attachment theory * Psychoanalysis as art and science * Psychoanalysis as a natural science * Violence in the family * On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel * The role of attachment in personality development * Attachment, communication, and the therapeutic process * Developmental psychiatry comes of age

A Secure Base. Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. New York (Basic Books) 1988.

An overview of the Family Socialization and Developmental Competence longitudinal program of research (FSP) is followed by a presentation of the hypotheses and findings pertaining to family patterns as determinants of adolescent competence, and of types of adolescent substance users. Data include clusters derived from comprehensive ratings of parents and their children completed independently within- and across-time periods at ages 4, 9, and 15 years. At Time 3 (T3), the sample included 139 adolescents and their parents from a predominantly affluent, well-educated, Caucasian population. Parenting types were identified that differ on the bases of commitment and balance of demandingness and responsiveness. Authoritative parents who are highly demanding and highly responsive were remarkably successful in protecting their adolescents from problem drug use, and in generating competence. Authoritative upbringing, although sufficient, is not a necessary condition to produce competent children. Casual recreationa...

The Influence of Parenting Style on Adolescent Competence and Substance Use

A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

The maturational processes and the facilitating environment

The main point of this paper can perhaps best be brought out through a comparison of the study of infancy with the study of the psycho-analytic transference.2 It cannot be too strongly emphasized that my statement is about infancy, and not primarily about psycho-analysis. The reason why this must be understood reaches to the root of the matter. If this paper does not contribute constructively, then it can only add to the existing confusion about the relative importance of personal and environmental influences in the development of the individual. In psycho-analysis as we know it there is no trauma that is outside the individual's omnipotence. Everything eventually comes under ego-control, and thus becomes related to secondary processes. The patient is not helped if the analyst says: 'Your mother was not good enough ... your father really seduced you ... your aunt dropped you.' Changes come in an analysis when the traumatic factors enter the psycho-analytic material in the patient's own way, and within the patient's omnipotence. The interpretations that are alterative are those that can be made in terms of projection. The same applies to the benign factors, factors that led to satisfaction. Everything is interpreted in terms of the individual's love and ambivalence. The analyst is prepared to wait a long time to be in a position to do exactly this kind of work. In infancy, however, good and bad things happen to the infant that are quite outside the infant's range. In fact infancy is the period in which the capacity for gathering external factors into the area of the infant's omnipotence is in process of formation. The ego support of the maternal care enables the infant to live and develop in spite of his being not yet able to control, or to feel responsible for, what is good and bad in the environment. The events of these earliest stages cannot be thought of as lost through what we know as the mechanisms of repression, and therefore analysts cannot expect to find them appearing as a result of work which lessens the forces of repression. It is possible that Freud was trying to allow for these phenomena when he used the term primary repression, but this is open to argument. What is fairly certain is that the matters under discussion here have had to be taken for granted in much of the psycho-analytic literature.3 Returning to psycho-analysis, I have said that the analyst is prepared to wait till the patient becomes able to present the environmental factors in terms that allow of their interpretation as projections. In the well-chosen case this result comes from the patient's capacity for confidence, which is rediscovered in the reliability of the analyst and the professional setting. Sometimes the analyst needs to wait a very long time; and in the case that is badly chosen for classical psycho-analysis it is likely that the reliability of the analyst is the most important factor (or more important than the interpretations) because the patient did not experience such reliability in the maternal care of infancy, and if the patient is to make use of such reliability he will need to find it for the first time in the analyst's behaviour. This would seem to be the basis for research into the problem of what a psycho-analyst can do in the treatment of schizophrenia and other psychoses. In borderline cases the analyst does not always wait in vain; in the course of time the patient becomes able to make use of the psycho-analytic interpretations of the original traumata

https://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Winnicott-D.-The-Theory-of-the-Parent-Infant-Relationship-IJPA-Vol.-41-pps.-585-595.pdf

The theory of the parent-infant relationship

Die fruhesten Erfahrungen des gesunden Sauglings, die sich in der Beziehung zu seinem ersten Besitz ausern, bieten ein reiches Beobachtungsfeld. Dieser erste Besitz ist nach ruckwarts mit autoerotischen Erscheinungen, mit dem Lutschen an der Faust und am Daumen, nach vorwarts mit den ersten weichen Stoffpuppen und Tieren und mit hartem Spielzeug verbunden. Er steht mit dem auseren Objekt (der Mutterbrust) wie mit den inneren Objekten (der magisch introjizierten Brust) in Zusammenhang und unterscheidet sich doch von beiden. Die Ubergangsobjekte und -phanomene gehoren dem Bereich der Illusion zu, die am Anfang aller Erfahrung steht. Diese fruhe Entwicklungsphase wird durch die besondere Fahigkeit der Mutter ermoglicht, sich den Bedurfnissen ihres Kindes anzupassen und dem Saugling damit die Illusion zu gestatten, das, was er sich erschafft, auch wirklich existiert. Im allgemeinen zieht das Kind seine Besetzungen vom Ubergangsobjekt allmahlich ab. Die Sucht kann als Regression auf das fruhe Entwicklungsstadium verstanden werden, in welchem die Ubergangsphanomene noch unangefochten bestanden; beim Fetischismus last sich der Fetisch als beharrlich festgehaltenes Objekt auffassen, das den fruhkindlichen Erfahrungen im Bereich der Ubergangsphanomene entstammt und mit der wahnhaften Vorstellung eines mutterlichen Phallus verbunden ist; Pseudologie und Stehlen konnen aus dem unbewusten Bedurfnis verstanden werden, die Kluft in der Kontinuitat des Erlebens vom Ubergangsobjekt her zu uberbrucken.

Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession.

* Introduction Mother And Child * A Man Looks at Motherhood * Getting to Know Your Baby * The Baby as a Going Concern * Infant Feeding * Where the Food Goes * The End of the Digestive Process * Close-up of Mother Feeding Baby * Breast Feeding * Why Do Babies Cry? * The World in Small Doses * The Baby as a Person * Weaning * Further Thoughts on Babies as Persons * The Innate Morality of the Baby * Instincts and Normal Difficulties * Young Children and Other People The Family * What About Father? * Their Standards and Yours * What Do We Mean by a Normal Child? * The Only Child * Twins * Why Children Play * The Child and Sex * Stealing and Telling Lies * First Experiments in Independence * Support for Normal Parents The Outside World * Needs of the Under-Fives * Mother, Teacher, and the Childs Needs * On Influencing and Being Influenced * Educational Diagnosis * Shyness and Nervous Disorders in Children * Sex Education in Schools * Visiting Children in Hospital * Aspects of Juvenile Delinquency * Roots of Aggression

D. W. Winnicott

Papers

Playing and Reality

The maturational processes and the facilitating environment

The theory of the parent-infant relationship

Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession.

The Child, the Family, and the Outside World