"Let us assume that health in the early development of the individual entails continuity of being. The early psyche-soma proceeds along a certain line of development provided its continuity of being is not disturbed; in other words, for the healthy development of the early psyche-soma there is a need for a perfect environment. At first the need is absolute." (1949- Mind and its relations to the psyche-soma)
It is difficult to understand this assertion by Winnicott, for where are we going to find a perfect environment? Freud, for one, always positis the environment as dangerous until the living unit finds a way of filtering its stimuli. Laplanche posits an inevitably exciting mother all the while she is nurturing and tenderly loving her baby. Moreover, it is not at all conceivable that the child would develop without some disturbance in the continuity. For, if the situation were perfect, why would the child need to develop? You could say that there are intrinsic biological forces that push the infant towards development, but we know that this is not enough in itself.
But Winnicott is not naïve to the point of positing the "perfect environment" as truly possible.
" The need for a good environment, which is absolute at first, rapidly becomes relative. The ordinary good mother is good enough. If she is good enough the infant becomes able to allow for her deficiencies by mental activity. This applies to meeting not only instinctual impulses but also all the most primitive types of ego need, even including the need for negative care or an alive neglect. The mental activity of the infant turns a good-enough environment into a perfect environment, that is to say, turns relative failure of adaptation into adaptive success. What releases the mother from her need to be near-perfect is the infant's understanding." (Ibid.)
The need that is "absolute at first" has, I believe, but an asymptotic i.e. purely ideal existence. Winnicott follows that line of thinking because he needs to arrive at the point where some of his patients have taught hime that a split occurs.
" At the present time the curious thing is that once again in medical scientific thought the brain has got equated with the mind, which is felt by a certain kind of ill person to be an enemy, and a thing in the skull. The surgeon who does a leucotomy would at first seem to be doing what the patient asks for, that is, to be relieving the patient of mind activity, the mind having become the enemy of the psyche-soma."
It is remarkable that Winnicott does not think that this "enemy" within is none that source f the drive. Links to Winnicott and the environment
Anyone who gives a look at the table of contents of Jan Abram’s extraordinary book The Language of Winnicott will immediately agree that the list of areas to which Winnicott made an original contribution is so long that it would be impossible to cover, let alone discuss, even a small fraction of them in one paper. Wishing to speak of Winnicott’s thinking with respect to the future, I therefore needed to pick one element that I thought would work as a sort of hub or crossroad for a number of other Winnicottian developments. One that speaks to me the most in that respect is the notion of environment.
The anecdote may be pure fiction, but we are told that during the war effort against Nazi Germany, at one point a member of Winston Churchill’s cabinet suggested that the government cut spending in the domain of arts and culture and redirect the funds to the military. At which point Churchill is said to have replied that this was out of the question. When asked why, he supposedly answered something like this: “What is the point of fighting the Nazis if we ourselves destroy our culture?” Again, this may be a purely imaginary story, but as the Italian saying goes, “Se non è vero, è ben trovato”: if it’s not true, it’s a damn good fiction.
This story seems to me to apply, mutatis mutandis, with something Winnicott writes in “The Location of the Cultural Experience”:
“Starting as we do from psychoneurotic illness and with ego defences related to anxiety that arises out of the instinctual life, we tend to think of health in terms of the state of ego defences. We say it is healthy when these defences are not rigid, etc. But we seldom reach the point at which we can start to describe what life is like apart from illness or absence of illness.
That is to say, we have yet to tackle the question of what life itself isabout.”
Obviously, we could object to this that to ask what life is about is not a psychoanalytic question. At least not if, as Winnicott himself has signaled at the start of his paper, we have no place in our topography for the cultural experience. But this is precisely what he was out to introduce in psychoanalysis: a place for the cultural experience based on playing, and this, to me, is one of Winnicott’s contributions by which he reveals himself a unique thinker.
Unique in many ways: as we know, he seldom uses Freud’s vocabulary, which is his prerogative though this left us with the sometimes tiresome task to reassure our colleagues that yes, Winnicott had read Freud and read him well, and that, in more than one way, he is sitting on Freud’s shoulders. I know from personal experience how costly it can be to insist that Freud and Winnicott operate on the same terrain, though with different words and concepts, and despite the inevitable theoretical clashes with Freud or other significant authors. But to me, these are not catastrophes; they are rather opportunities for doing more thinking.
As I said, the list would be quite long of all the important ideas that Winnicott introduced. But, as I already stated elsewhere, Winnicott’s concept are one thing; the other, and to me even more important thing, is Winnicott’s way thinking. Winnicott, indeed, is someone who thinks from two sides at once, or better, who thinks at the limits, or on the edge, as I will hope to show later. The notion of environment is one such term. But let’s first go back to the potential space and the location of the cultural experience.
The idea of an intermediate space where our cultural experience seems now so obvious that we may not always realize how central it is. For one thing, it does away with a static and naïve conception of two clearly distinct inner and outer world. Moreover, it results, I believe, from a more granular approach to the notion of environment – another concept that seems self-evident but which took a Winnicott to make its deserved entrance into the psychoanalytic domain.
Saying this, I do not mean that everything Winnicott writes on these two subjects is flawless. For instance, let me point right away at a problem I see in the way Winnicott locates the potential space when he situates it between “inner or personal psychic reality and […] the actual world in which the individual lives**.”** In so doing, Winnicott places himself from the standpoint of an observer external to the individual, or worse, from God’s perspective i.e. as someone who knows the difference between the two realities in-between which the cultural experience is located. But isn’t this contradictory with the fact that Winnicott is describing an experience and precisely not some hard knowledge ? After all, does any of us know the “actual world” we live in ? For sure, that world is made of other humans, i.e. of people which, at the metapsychological level, we cannot know what they “actually” are. Yet, I think we all understand what Winnicott means, because what matters most here are not the two ends of the universe he is describing, but precisely the space, or the line, in-between, and which “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. Clearly, Winnicott is here speaking of something akin to Freud’s “contact barriers”, which designate neither barriers impeding contact, nor a contact that abolishes the barriers, but something doing both things simultaneously. What I am saying is that for Winnicott to describe the potential space in the way he does in the short passage I quoted is more radical than he himself may seem to notice. For if that space both joins and separates, and if it is potential, then it raises interesting questions about the notion of knowledge. If so, it is not for nothing that Winnicott also introduces the notion of illusion, which in his thinking has nothing pejorative, quite the contrary.
The space that both joins and separates precludes any firm knowledge of the “actual world”. The latter is something that, after Winnicott’s introduction of transitional objects and potential space, can only be left for physicists to debate, and we know how even they have different, sometimes contrasted views and uncertainties on the subject. So, again, while we understand what Winnicott means, it is important to remember that the “actual world” if and when it is met directly – i.e. in the absence of the buffer zone Winnicott brought to our attention – provokes a traumatic experience. Hence, it is all the more important to get as clear a sense as possible of what the Freudian “contact barrier”, as it is used by Winnicott, is made of, or better, what is its function.
The “barrier” or the line in question, which a higher resolution also speaks of the potential space, is a defining concept not only in the Winnicottian conception, but for the definition of the domain of psychoanalysis as a whole, i.e. as a domain of life. In recent years I have become convinced that the domain of psychic functioning must be congruent with the domain explored by the sciences of the living inasmuch as the living is defined as autopoietic, that is: self-organized and self-maintained. For this, we must first agree that the domain of life includes systems or organisms that need not be biologically implemented. For if we adopt autopoiesis as the central criterion for defining the living, then, on top of biological organisms (individual and collective), we also find small human groups and organizations – inasmuch as they possess viable rules for their operations (rules need not be explicitly written down) –, up to society and culture in general. These indeed are all self-created entities that, since they operate according to their internal laws just as any biological organism, require a constant reassertion of their difference with regard to their environment. The environment in question is not some inert surroundings but an environment that is simultaneously nurturing and threatening, the differentiation from which is never achieved once and for all. For that reason, even as the “confidence” and the “trust” invoked by Winnicott are present within an individual system, specific conditions can threaten the individuality of the system, which means the system itself. Moreover, even in the most ordinary situations, seductions operate which lure the individual into group mentalities of which we nowadays observe various examples: political or religious sects, conspiracy theorists and so on.
Saying this, we are also called to notice that a system may, and frequently does, represent the environment for another system. This means that contradictions and conflict exist between the various levels of organization. Thus, autonomy of the individual system can be challenged by group-life requirements… In other words, any given system can either nurture or threaten another system. Nurturing requires respecting the internal laws of the nurtured system. Threat results from the lack of such respect, which in Winnicottian terms we could call excessive impingement. In the latter case, the irony is that, at the clinical level of experience – as Ferenczi (1932) clearly saw – trauma through sexual abuse and its disavowal can induce a specific sensitivity that makes the victim abler than usual to guess the predator’s desires. Hence, the internal rule of the abused child will be deviated towards pleasing and appeasing the predator. I used the t=word irony, because, in spite of appearances, this novel sensitivity is still a form of auto-regulation of the victim’s system, the objective of its submission to the other being for the sake of psychic or even physical survival.
Freud (1920,1925) defined the environment as threatening until proven otherwise. [Though we must also recall that in his unpublished Project he invoked the intervention of the Nebenmensch rescuing the baby born in a state of helplessness. Moreover, as Winnicott himself mentioned, it might well be Freud who, with his famous footnote in the 1911 paper on “The two principles…”, inspired him in stating that there is no such thing as an infant.] This conception of the surroundings is based in Freud’s implicit reference to autopoiesis, under the heading of homeostasis. The contact barriers of 1895 have been replaced, in 1920, by the stimulus barrier, but the idea is quite similar and apparently clashes with Winnicott’s idea of the environment which is, in ordinary situations, a holding environment. Indeed, Freud’s description of the dangerous environment applies to ordinary situations. His is a systemic conception about which we could say that the system knows nothing, at first, about the intentions of the helping other (Nebenmensch) and will only reach trust and confidence after some “experience of satisfaction” is obtained.
Still, even this linear description is found wanting, because, as Laplanche (1987) has theorized, the mother, and any nurturing adult in her stead, is by the same token, inadvertently seducing the child. In view of which, the alternative is not between a holding vs a toxic environment, but something that, in ordinary circumstances i.e. in the case of the ordinarily devoted mother as well, there is a mix of attachment process and generalized seduction. Obviously this does not preclude situations more extreme, where perverse, intrusive seduction can certainly yield what we may call a toxic environment. The idea here is to stress the fact that there is no holding environment that is not a seductive environment, even in the absence of gross mishandling on the part of the adults. The good-enough mother is simultaneously a sexually exciting mother and both effects obtain together around the same nurturing interactions.
It would be tempting, at this point, to consider that the difference between an ordinarily seductive environment and a toxic one lies in the possibility for an intermediate space to form. This, in fact, is totally compatible with the fact that ordinary seduction – i.e. one in which no excessive impingement or “intromission” is present – is one where the child, confronted with the, for it enigmatic sexual excitation, is left the freedom to operate its own translation of the messages emanating from the adult world. And let us immediately underline how this works well with the found/created paradox, in that the freedom of translation is precisely one where the child is not forced to reach an expected result, but is left the liberty to construct its own meanings from the cultural elements it finds in its environment, besides, that is, the exciting sexual messages. I would be also tempted here to consider that the cultural elements that will enter the child’s bricolage of infantile theories and fantasies are found in the very space Winnicott identified as the location of the cultural experience.
Let us notice, however, that Winnicott’s description of the locus for the cultural experience adds more than an additional topographical element. The locus in question, to begin with, is not really a geographical place; it is a potential space, it is a limit. And by potential, I believe we can understand that it waxes and wanes depending on whether the experience actually occurs. Hence, as a space, it can really only be pointed at in the après-coup of the experience. Thus, our attention is drawn to the experience more than to the geographical metaphor of the potential space. For someone who believes, like I do, that space metaphors are just… metaphors, whose usage tends to immobilize the dynamics of the psyche, the notion of experience gains priority, and it highlights the time dimension of psychic rather than their spatial location.
So, we are once again told about a limit, an evanescent locus that only exists when the cultural experience is happening and otherwise remains potential. This, to me, is a good representative of Winnicott’s modernity. His thinking here is truly innovative all the while it stands on firm Freudian ground as I will now try to show.
When we speak, for instance, of the cultural environment, we are naturally brought to look for the already constituted set of components – linguistic, literary, artistic, administrative, legal etc.– of what we call a culture. Winnicott, for his part, is pointing at the actual cultural experience. At this point, please bear with me as I distort a bit the term “actual” to make it a signifier of what is, well, actually occurring, not only in the sense that it is really occurring, but also that it is occurring now, i.e. in the time dimension that I dubbed “actual time”… This is a somewhat unsatisfactory translation from the French “temps actuel”… “Actual time” is a time that is “always now”; it is also a time when conscious and unconscious functioning happen without a clear delimitation between them. For I believe this is the specific nature of the cultural experience that Winnicott is alluding to, if we consider that, in his own words, it emanates from “the play of those who have not yet heard of games.” I hope we can easily agree that when children, or for that matter, adults are truly playing, they frequently if not always lose the notion of time, i.e. of chronological time, the time of the clock; the sort of time that, on the contrary, is a mandatory dimension in any game.
Let me now push this idea a bit further. Going back to Winnicott’s question of “what life itself is about”, we notice that, contrary to what is often said, life is not a game, while it is certainly inseparable from the cultural experience - which includes playing. Obviously, too often life does take the allure of a game: there are strict rules, time is counted, monetary value is put on time spent… But I think we can agree that this is not the aspect of our existence that we cherish the most, rather opting for those moments when we are not asked to justify our being there or our preferred way of spending that time; a time that we hope will not be computed. An indeterminate beach of time allowing for a creative presence to the world.
It follows that the notion of environment, when considered from the point of view of the living system, is not an already constituted set that waited for the individual system/organism to come and inhabit it, nor is it something to be created at some later moment, but something constantly in the making, constantly being recomposed from the potential, virtual or only posthumously conceivable space that “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. In other words, wherever there is a system, there is an environment. One is not thinkable without the other. That the individual forming the system may ignore the existence of the environment, this is obviously and frequently the case. Western industrialized societies did so for more than two centuries!
Let us now turn our attention to Winnicott’s notion of the individual-environment set-up as the “centre of gravity of the being”. It is true that Winnicott proposes that at some point the child acquires an “internal environment” (Depressive position, p. 8) and that this seems to draw us back to a notion of environment that was geographically outside and is now geographically inside, thus making of the individual-environment set-up something acquired and stabilized for good rather than a constant work or differentiation. So here I would like to pull Winnicott on one side of the divide and ask him to keep in line with contemporary theories of the living, where the individual-environment set-up is never really secured for good but describes a constant reiteration. Mind you, there is already in Winnicott all it takes to make that connection: the locus of the cultural experience is indeed comparable to the line or membrane that keeps reiterating the difference between individual and environment, hence constantly (re)creating the environment through the cultural experience.
I had warned that I was pulling Winnicott on one side of the fence. For if we take him seriously when he says that the individual environment set-up is the “centre of gravity”, then I suggest this is true at every level of psychic functions. This is because the notion of system/environment – or individual/environment –has what we could call a fractal quality i.e. the pattern repeats itself at every level we examine phenomena in living systems. For instance, the infant is a system (or individual) with regard to the mother as environment. At the same level, the mother is also a system and the baby can be seen as her environment (or we could include baby, father, grandmother etc., depending on what aspect we wish to study). But the mother-infant unit is also a system (or individual) and the rest of the family, or the maternity ward, or whatever comes into significant interaction with it, forms the environment.
It follows that when Winnicott says that the mother-infant unit is the center of gravity, he is implicitly saying many things: 1- that the mother-infant unit should be looked upon as an individual, a single system; 2- that, form this point of view, the infant’s process of individuation is not yet completed, which is totally congruent with the notion of Hilflösigkeit (helplessness) identified by Freud from early on. Therefore, the systemic view remains compatible also when Winnicott speaks of the creation by the child of its own internal environment. The fractal quality I just mentioned allows for the dynamic understanding of each one of Winnicott’s implementations of the term “environment” and we can follow him when he seems to describe things from different perspectives. For, to speak of an internal environment makes perfect sense within the theory of autopoïetic systems: the system “ego” has the the system “id” for is environment; and the whole psyche cab be seen as the individual in the midst of the somatic environment; psyche-soma in turn has the mother as an environment etc. And within the ego, when the notion of self becomes operative, we get a self/non-self relationship…
Having said this, I notice that Winnicott could indeed have resorted to the notion of environment in his writings about the psycho-soma and he implicitly does so when he speaks of “an indwelling of the psyche in the soma” (1971), but here I must say it is not clear if Winnicott means it literally or if he is describing the subjective experience. So here things get a bit complicated, because Winnicott’s concepts may not always parallel that of others, especially in the case of “mind”. What I mean is that I can adhere to his definition of the psyche as “the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and functions, that is, of physical aliveness”, so that psyche and soma are but two sides of the same coin. The problem is that if we ask how and by what function is the “imaginative elaboration” accomplished, one immediately thinks of… a mind. So, when Winnicott speaks of a mind as a function of the psyche-soma, he must be thinking of mind in different terms than usual. See also Winnicott and the perfect environmentLuhmann et les systèmes vivantsAutopoietic systems, Varela
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"Let us assume that health in the early development of the individual entails continuity of being. The early psyche-soma proceeds along a certain line of development provided its continuity of being is not disturbed; in other words, for the healthy development of the early psyche-soma there is a need for a perfect environment. At first the need is absolute." (1949- Mind and its relations to the psyche-soma)
It is difficult to understand this assertion by Winnicott, for where are we going to find a perfect environment? Freud, for one, always positis the environment as dangerous until the living unit finds a way of filtering its stimuli. Laplanche posits an inevitably exciting mother all the while she is nurturing and tenderly loving her baby. Moreover, it is not at all conceivable that the child would develop without some disturbance in the continuity. For, if the situation were perfect, why would the child need to develop? You could say that there are intrinsic biological forces that push the infant towards development, but we know that this is not enough in itself.
But Winnicott is not naïve to the point of positing the "perfect environment" as truly possible.
" The need for a good environment, which is absolute at first, rapidly becomes relative. The ordinary good mother is good enough. If she is good enough the infant becomes able to allow for her deficiencies by mental activity. This applies to meeting not only instinctual impulses but also all the most primitive types of ego need, even including the need for negative care or an alive neglect. The mental activity of the infant turns a good-enough environment into a perfect environment, that is to say, turns relative failure of adaptation into adaptive success. What releases the mother from her need to be near-perfect is the infant's understanding." (Ibid.)
The need that is "absolute at first" has, I believe, but an asymptotic i.e. purely ideal existence. Winnicott follows that line of thinking because he needs to arrive at the point where some of his patients have taught hime that a split occurs.
" At the present time the curious thing is that once again in medical scientific thought the brain has got equated with the mind, which is felt by a certain kind of ill person to be an enemy, and a thing in the skull. The surgeon who does a leucotomy would at first seem to be doing what the patient asks for, that is, to be relieving the patient of mind activity, the mind having become the enemy of the psyche-soma."
It is remarkable that Winnicott does not think that this "enemy" within is none that source f the drive. Links to Winnicott and the environment
Anyone who gives a look at the table of contents of Jan Abram’s extraordinary book The Language of Winnicott will immediately agree that the list of areas to which Winnicott made an original contribution is so long that it would be impossible to cover, let alone discuss, even a small fraction of them in one paper. Wishing to speak of Winnicott’s thinking with respect to the future, I therefore needed to pick one element that I thought would work as a sort of hub or crossroad for a number of other Winnicottian developments. One that speaks to me the most in that respect is the notion of environment.
The anecdote may be pure fiction, but we are told that during the war effort against Nazi Germany, at one point a member of Winston Churchill’s cabinet suggested that the government cut spending in the domain of arts and culture and redirect the funds to the military. At which point Churchill is said to have replied that this was out of the question. When asked why, he supposedly answered something like this: “What is the point of fighting the Nazis if we ourselves destroy our culture?” Again, this may be a purely imaginary story, but as the Italian saying goes, “Se non è vero, è ben trovato”: if it’s not true, it’s a damn good fiction.
This story seems to me to apply, mutatis mutandis, with something Winnicott writes in “The Location of the Cultural Experience”:
“Starting as we do from psychoneurotic illness and with ego defences related to anxiety that arises out of the instinctual life, we tend to think of health in terms of the state of ego defences. We say it is healthy when these defences are not rigid, etc. But we seldom reach the point at which we can start to describe what life is like apart from illness or absence of illness.
That is to say, we have yet to tackle the question of what life itself isabout.”
Obviously, we could object to this that to ask what life is about is not a psychoanalytic question. At least not if, as Winnicott himself has signaled at the start of his paper, we have no place in our topography for the cultural experience. But this is precisely what he was out to introduce in psychoanalysis: a place for the cultural experience based on playing, and this, to me, is one of Winnicott’s contributions by which he reveals himself a unique thinker.
Unique in many ways: as we know, he seldom uses Freud’s vocabulary, which is his prerogative though this left us with the sometimes tiresome task to reassure our colleagues that yes, Winnicott had read Freud and read him well, and that, in more than one way, he is sitting on Freud’s shoulders. I know from personal experience how costly it can be to insist that Freud and Winnicott operate on the same terrain, though with different words and concepts, and despite the inevitable theoretical clashes with Freud or other significant authors. But to me, these are not catastrophes; they are rather opportunities for doing more thinking.
As I said, the list would be quite long of all the important ideas that Winnicott introduced. But, as I already stated elsewhere, Winnicott’s concept are one thing; the other, and to me even more important thing, is Winnicott’s way thinking. Winnicott, indeed, is someone who thinks from two sides at once, or better, who thinks at the limits, or on the edge, as I will hope to show later. The notion of environment is one such term. But let’s first go back to the potential space and the location of the cultural experience.
The idea of an intermediate space where our cultural experience seems now so obvious that we may not always realize how central it is. For one thing, it does away with a static and naïve conception of two clearly distinct inner and outer world. Moreover, it results, I believe, from a more granular approach to the notion of environment – another concept that seems self-evident but which took a Winnicott to make its deserved entrance into the psychoanalytic domain.
Saying this, I do not mean that everything Winnicott writes on these two subjects is flawless. For instance, let me point right away at a problem I see in the way Winnicott locates the potential space when he situates it between “inner or personal psychic reality and […] the actual world in which the individual lives**.”** In so doing, Winnicott places himself from the standpoint of an observer external to the individual, or worse, from God’s perspective i.e. as someone who knows the difference between the two realities in-between which the cultural experience is located. But isn’t this contradictory with the fact that Winnicott is describing an experience and precisely not some hard knowledge ? After all, does any of us know the “actual world” we live in ? For sure, that world is made of other humans, i.e. of people which, at the metapsychological level, we cannot know what they “actually” are. Yet, I think we all understand what Winnicott means, because what matters most here are not the two ends of the universe he is describing, but precisely the space, or the line, in-between, and which “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. Clearly, Winnicott is here speaking of something akin to Freud’s “contact barriers”, which designate neither barriers impeding contact, nor a contact that abolishes the barriers, but something doing both things simultaneously. What I am saying is that for Winnicott to describe the potential space in the way he does in the short passage I quoted is more radical than he himself may seem to notice. For if that space both joins and separates, and if it is potential, then it raises interesting questions about the notion of knowledge. If so, it is not for nothing that Winnicott also introduces the notion of illusion, which in his thinking has nothing pejorative, quite the contrary.
The space that both joins and separates precludes any firm knowledge of the “actual world”. The latter is something that, after Winnicott’s introduction of transitional objects and potential space, can only be left for physicists to debate, and we know how even they have different, sometimes contrasted views and uncertainties on the subject. So, again, while we understand what Winnicott means, it is important to remember that the “actual world” if and when it is met directly – i.e. in the absence of the buffer zone Winnicott brought to our attention – provokes a traumatic experience. Hence, it is all the more important to get as clear a sense as possible of what the Freudian “contact barrier”, as it is used by Winnicott, is made of, or better, what is its function.
The “barrier” or the line in question, which a higher resolution also speaks of the potential space, is a defining concept not only in the Winnicottian conception, but for the definition of the domain of psychoanalysis as a whole, i.e. as a domain of life. In recent years I have become convinced that the domain of psychic functioning must be congruent with the domain explored by the sciences of the living inasmuch as the living is defined as autopoietic, that is: self-organized and self-maintained. For this, we must first agree that the domain of life includes systems or organisms that need not be biologically implemented. For if we adopt autopoiesis as the central criterion for defining the living, then, on top of biological organisms (individual and collective), we also find small human groups and organizations – inasmuch as they possess viable rules for their operations (rules need not be explicitly written down) –, up to society and culture in general. These indeed are all self-created entities that, since they operate according to their internal laws just as any biological organism, require a constant reassertion of their difference with regard to their environment. The environment in question is not some inert surroundings but an environment that is simultaneously nurturing and threatening, the differentiation from which is never achieved once and for all. For that reason, even as the “confidence” and the “trust” invoked by Winnicott are present within an individual system, specific conditions can threaten the individuality of the system, which means the system itself. Moreover, even in the most ordinary situations, seductions operate which lure the individual into group mentalities of which we nowadays observe various examples: political or religious sects, conspiracy theorists and so on.
Saying this, we are also called to notice that a system may, and frequently does, represent the environment for another system. This means that contradictions and conflict exist between the various levels of organization. Thus, autonomy of the individual system can be challenged by group-life requirements… In other words, any given system can either nurture or threaten another system. Nurturing requires respecting the internal laws of the nurtured system. Threat results from the lack of such respect, which in Winnicottian terms we could call excessive impingement. In the latter case, the irony is that, at the clinical level of experience – as Ferenczi (1932) clearly saw – trauma through sexual abuse and its disavowal can induce a specific sensitivity that makes the victim abler than usual to guess the predator’s desires. Hence, the internal rule of the abused child will be deviated towards pleasing and appeasing the predator. I used the t=word irony, because, in spite of appearances, this novel sensitivity is still a form of auto-regulation of the victim’s system, the objective of its submission to the other being for the sake of psychic or even physical survival.
Freud (1920,1925) defined the environment as threatening until proven otherwise. [Though we must also recall that in his unpublished Project he invoked the intervention of the Nebenmensch rescuing the baby born in a state of helplessness. Moreover, as Winnicott himself mentioned, it might well be Freud who, with his famous footnote in the 1911 paper on “The two principles…”, inspired him in stating that there is no such thing as an infant.] This conception of the surroundings is based in Freud’s implicit reference to autopoiesis, under the heading of homeostasis. The contact barriers of 1895 have been replaced, in 1920, by the stimulus barrier, but the idea is quite similar and apparently clashes with Winnicott’s idea of the environment which is, in ordinary situations, a holding environment. Indeed, Freud’s description of the dangerous environment applies to ordinary situations. His is a systemic conception about which we could say that the system knows nothing, at first, about the intentions of the helping other (Nebenmensch) and will only reach trust and confidence after some “experience of satisfaction” is obtained.
Still, even this linear description is found wanting, because, as Laplanche (1987) has theorized, the mother, and any nurturing adult in her stead, is by the same token, inadvertently seducing the child. In view of which, the alternative is not between a holding vs a toxic environment, but something that, in ordinary circumstances i.e. in the case of the ordinarily devoted mother as well, there is a mix of attachment process and generalized seduction. Obviously this does not preclude situations more extreme, where perverse, intrusive seduction can certainly yield what we may call a toxic environment. The idea here is to stress the fact that there is no holding environment that is not a seductive environment, even in the absence of gross mishandling on the part of the adults. The good-enough mother is simultaneously a sexually exciting mother and both effects obtain together around the same nurturing interactions.
It would be tempting, at this point, to consider that the difference between an ordinarily seductive environment and a toxic one lies in the possibility for an intermediate space to form. This, in fact, is totally compatible with the fact that ordinary seduction – i.e. one in which no excessive impingement or “intromission” is present – is one where the child, confronted with the, for it enigmatic sexual excitation, is left the freedom to operate its own translation of the messages emanating from the adult world. And let us immediately underline how this works well with the found/created paradox, in that the freedom of translation is precisely one where the child is not forced to reach an expected result, but is left the liberty to construct its own meanings from the cultural elements it finds in its environment, besides, that is, the exciting sexual messages. I would be also tempted here to consider that the cultural elements that will enter the child’s bricolage of infantile theories and fantasies are found in the very space Winnicott identified as the location of the cultural experience.
Let us notice, however, that Winnicott’s description of the locus for the cultural experience adds more than an additional topographical element. The locus in question, to begin with, is not really a geographical place; it is a potential space, it is a limit. And by potential, I believe we can understand that it waxes and wanes depending on whether the experience actually occurs. Hence, as a space, it can really only be pointed at in the après-coup of the experience. Thus, our attention is drawn to the experience more than to the geographical metaphor of the potential space. For someone who believes, like I do, that space metaphors are just… metaphors, whose usage tends to immobilize the dynamics of the psyche, the notion of experience gains priority, and it highlights the time dimension of psychic rather than their spatial location.
So, we are once again told about a limit, an evanescent locus that only exists when the cultural experience is happening and otherwise remains potential. This, to me, is a good representative of Winnicott’s modernity. His thinking here is truly innovative all the while it stands on firm Freudian ground as I will now try to show.
When we speak, for instance, of the cultural environment, we are naturally brought to look for the already constituted set of components – linguistic, literary, artistic, administrative, legal etc.– of what we call a culture. Winnicott, for his part, is pointing at the actual cultural experience. At this point, please bear with me as I distort a bit the term “actual” to make it a signifier of what is, well, actually occurring, not only in the sense that it is really occurring, but also that it is occurring now, i.e. in the time dimension that I dubbed “actual time”… This is a somewhat unsatisfactory translation from the French “temps actuel”… “Actual time” is a time that is “always now”; it is also a time when conscious and unconscious functioning happen without a clear delimitation between them. For I believe this is the specific nature of the cultural experience that Winnicott is alluding to, if we consider that, in his own words, it emanates from “the play of those who have not yet heard of games.” I hope we can easily agree that when children, or for that matter, adults are truly playing, they frequently if not always lose the notion of time, i.e. of chronological time, the time of the clock; the sort of time that, on the contrary, is a mandatory dimension in any game.
Let me now push this idea a bit further. Going back to Winnicott’s question of “what life itself is about”, we notice that, contrary to what is often said, life is not a game, while it is certainly inseparable from the cultural experience - which includes playing. Obviously, too often life does take the allure of a game: there are strict rules, time is counted, monetary value is put on time spent… But I think we can agree that this is not the aspect of our existence that we cherish the most, rather opting for those moments when we are not asked to justify our being there or our preferred way of spending that time; a time that we hope will not be computed. An indeterminate beach of time allowing for a creative presence to the world.
It follows that the notion of environment, when considered from the point of view of the living system, is not an already constituted set that waited for the individual system/organism to come and inhabit it, nor is it something to be created at some later moment, but something constantly in the making, constantly being recomposed from the potential, virtual or only posthumously conceivable space that “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. In other words, wherever there is a system, there is an environment. One is not thinkable without the other. That the individual forming the system may ignore the existence of the environment, this is obviously and frequently the case. Western industrialized societies did so for more than two centuries!
Let us now turn our attention to Winnicott’s notion of the individual-environment set-up as the “centre of gravity of the being”. It is true that Winnicott proposes that at some point the child acquires an “internal environment” (Depressive position, p. 8) and that this seems to draw us back to a notion of environment that was geographically outside and is now geographically inside, thus making of the individual-environment set-up something acquired and stabilized for good rather than a constant work or differentiation. So here I would like to pull Winnicott on one side of the divide and ask him to keep in line with contemporary theories of the living, where the individual-environment set-up is never really secured for good but describes a constant reiteration. Mind you, there is already in Winnicott all it takes to make that connection: the locus of the cultural experience is indeed comparable to the line or membrane that keeps reiterating the difference between individual and environment, hence constantly (re)creating the environment through the cultural experience.
I had warned that I was pulling Winnicott on one side of the fence. For if we take him seriously when he says that the individual environment set-up is the “centre of gravity”, then I suggest this is true at every level of psychic functions. This is because the notion of system/environment – or individual/environment –has what we could call a fractal quality i.e. the pattern repeats itself at every level we examine phenomena in living systems. For instance, the infant is a system (or individual) with regard to the mother as environment. At the same level, the mother is also a system and the baby can be seen as her environment (or we could include baby, father, grandmother etc., depending on what aspect we wish to study). But the mother-infant unit is also a system (or individual) and the rest of the family, or the maternity ward, or whatever comes into significant interaction with it, forms the environment.
It follows that when Winnicott says that the mother-infant unit is the center of gravity, he is implicitly saying many things: 1- that the mother-infant unit should be looked upon as an individual, a single system; 2- that, form this point of view, the infant’s process of individuation is not yet completed, which is totally congruent with the notion of Hilflösigkeit (helplessness) identified by Freud from early on. Therefore, the systemic view remains compatible also when Winnicott speaks of the creation by the child of its own internal environment. The fractal quality I just mentioned allows for the dynamic understanding of each one of Winnicott’s implementations of the term “environment” and we can follow him when he seems to describe things from different perspectives. For, to speak of an internal environment makes perfect sense within the theory of autopoïetic systems: the system “ego” has the the system “id” for is environment; and the whole psyche cab be seen as the individual in the midst of the somatic environment; psyche-soma in turn has the mother as an environment etc. And within the ego, when the notion of self becomes operative, we get a self/non-self relationship…
Having said this, I notice that Winnicott could indeed have resorted to the notion of environment in his writings about the psycho-soma and he implicitly does so when he speaks of “an indwelling of the psyche in the soma” (1971), but here I must say it is not clear if Winnicott means it literally or if he is describing the subjective experience. So here things get a bit complicated, because Winnicott’s concepts may not always parallel that of others, especially in the case of “mind”. What I mean is that I can adhere to his definition of the psyche as “the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and functions, that is, of physical aliveness”, so that psyche and soma are but two sides of the same coin. The problem is that if we ask how and by what function is the “imaginative elaboration” accomplished, one immediately thinks of… a mind. So, when Winnicott speaks of a mind as a function of the psyche-soma, he must be thinking of mind in different terms than usual. See also Winnicott and the perfect environmentLuhmann et les systèmes vivantsAutopoietic systems, Varela
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"Let us assume that health in the early development of the individual entails continuity of being. The early psyche-soma proceeds along a certain line of development provided its continuity of being is not disturbed; in other words, for the healthy development of the early psyche-soma there is a need for a perfect environment. At first the need is absolute." (1949- Mind and its relations to the psyche-soma)
It is difficult to understand this assertion by Winnicott, for where are we going to find a perfect environment? Freud, for one, always positis the environment as dangerous until the living unit finds a way of filtering its stimuli. Laplanche posits an inevitably exciting mother all the while she is nurturing and tenderly loving her baby. Moreover, it is not at all conceivable that the child would develop without some disturbance in the continuity. For, if the situation were perfect, why would the child need to develop? You could say that there are intrinsic biological forces that push the infant towards development, but we know that this is not enough in itself.
But Winnicott is not naïve to the point of positing the "perfect environment" as truly possible.
" The need for a good environment, which is absolute at first, rapidly becomes relative. The ordinary good mother is good enough. If she is good enough the infant becomes able to allow for her deficiencies by mental activity. This applies to meeting not only instinctual impulses but also all the most primitive types of ego need, even including the need for negative care or an alive neglect. The mental activity of the infant turns a good-enough environment into a perfect environment, that is to say, turns relative failure of adaptation into adaptive success. What releases the mother from her need to be near-perfect is the infant's understanding." (Ibid.)
The need that is "absolute at first" has, I believe, but an asymptotic i.e. purely ideal existence. Winnicott follows that line of thinking because he needs to arrive at the point where some of his patients have taught hime that a split occurs.
" At the present time the curious thing is that once again in medical scientific thought the brain has got equated with the mind, which is felt by a certain kind of ill person to be an enemy, and a thing in the skull. The surgeon who does a leucotomy would at first seem to be doing what the patient asks for, that is, to be relieving the patient of mind activity, the mind having become the enemy of the psyche-soma."
It is remarkable that Winnicott does not think that this "enemy" within is none that source f the drive. Links to Winnicott and the environment
Anyone who gives a look at the table of contents of Jan Abram’s extraordinary book The Language of Winnicott will immediately agree that the list of areas to which Winnicott made an original contribution is so long that it would be impossible to cover, let alone discuss, even a small fraction of them in one paper. Wishing to speak of Winnicott’s thinking with respect to the future, I therefore needed to pick one element that I thought would work as a sort of hub or crossroad for a number of other Winnicottian developments. One that speaks to me the most in that respect is the notion of environment.
The anecdote may be pure fiction, but we are told that during the war effort against Nazi Germany, at one point a member of Winston Churchill’s cabinet suggested that the government cut spending in the domain of arts and culture and redirect the funds to the military. At which point Churchill is said to have replied that this was out of the question. When asked why, he supposedly answered something like this: “What is the point of fighting the Nazis if we ourselves destroy our culture?” Again, this may be a purely imaginary story, but as the Italian saying goes, “Se non è vero, è ben trovato”: if it’s not true, it’s a damn good fiction.
This story seems to me to apply, mutatis mutandis, with something Winnicott writes in “The Location of the Cultural Experience”:
“Starting as we do from psychoneurotic illness and with ego defences related to anxiety that arises out of the instinctual life, we tend to think of health in terms of the state of ego defences. We say it is healthy when these defences are not rigid, etc. But we seldom reach the point at which we can start to describe what life is like apart from illness or absence of illness.
That is to say, we have yet to tackle the question of what life itself isabout.”
Obviously, we could object to this that to ask what life is about is not a psychoanalytic question. At least not if, as Winnicott himself has signaled at the start of his paper, we have no place in our topography for the cultural experience. But this is precisely what he was out to introduce in psychoanalysis: a place for the cultural experience based on playing, and this, to me, is one of Winnicott’s contributions by which he reveals himself a unique thinker.
Unique in many ways: as we know, he seldom uses Freud’s vocabulary, which is his prerogative though this left us with the sometimes tiresome task to reassure our colleagues that yes, Winnicott had read Freud and read him well, and that, in more than one way, he is sitting on Freud’s shoulders. I know from personal experience how costly it can be to insist that Freud and Winnicott operate on the same terrain, though with different words and concepts, and despite the inevitable theoretical clashes with Freud or other significant authors. But to me, these are not catastrophes; they are rather opportunities for doing more thinking.
As I said, the list would be quite long of all the important ideas that Winnicott introduced. But, as I already stated elsewhere, Winnicott’s concept are one thing; the other, and to me even more important thing, is Winnicott’s way thinking. Winnicott, indeed, is someone who thinks from two sides at once, or better, who thinks at the limits, or on the edge, as I will hope to show later. The notion of environment is one such term. But let’s first go back to the potential space and the location of the cultural experience.
The idea of an intermediate space where our cultural experience seems now so obvious that we may not always realize how central it is. For one thing, it does away with a static and naïve conception of two clearly distinct inner and outer world. Moreover, it results, I believe, from a more granular approach to the notion of environment – another concept that seems self-evident but which took a Winnicott to make its deserved entrance into the psychoanalytic domain.
Saying this, I do not mean that everything Winnicott writes on these two subjects is flawless. For instance, let me point right away at a problem I see in the way Winnicott locates the potential space when he situates it between “inner or personal psychic reality and […] the actual world in which the individual lives**.”** In so doing, Winnicott places himself from the standpoint of an observer external to the individual, or worse, from God’s perspective i.e. as someone who knows the difference between the two realities in-between which the cultural experience is located. But isn’t this contradictory with the fact that Winnicott is describing an experience and precisely not some hard knowledge ? After all, does any of us know the “actual world” we live in ? For sure, that world is made of other humans, i.e. of people which, at the metapsychological level, we cannot know what they “actually” are. Yet, I think we all understand what Winnicott means, because what matters most here are not the two ends of the universe he is describing, but precisely the space, or the line, in-between, and which “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. Clearly, Winnicott is here speaking of something akin to Freud’s “contact barriers”, which designate neither barriers impeding contact, nor a contact that abolishes the barriers, but something doing both things simultaneously. What I am saying is that for Winnicott to describe the potential space in the way he does in the short passage I quoted is more radical than he himself may seem to notice. For if that space both joins and separates, and if it is potential, then it raises interesting questions about the notion of knowledge. If so, it is not for nothing that Winnicott also introduces the notion of illusion, which in his thinking has nothing pejorative, quite the contrary.
The space that both joins and separates precludes any firm knowledge of the “actual world”. The latter is something that, after Winnicott’s introduction of transitional objects and potential space, can only be left for physicists to debate, and we know how even they have different, sometimes contrasted views and uncertainties on the subject. So, again, while we understand what Winnicott means, it is important to remember that the “actual world” if and when it is met directly – i.e. in the absence of the buffer zone Winnicott brought to our attention – provokes a traumatic experience. Hence, it is all the more important to get as clear a sense as possible of what the Freudian “contact barrier”, as it is used by Winnicott, is made of, or better, what is its function.
The “barrier” or the line in question, which a higher resolution also speaks of the potential space, is a defining concept not only in the Winnicottian conception, but for the definition of the domain of psychoanalysis as a whole, i.e. as a domain of life. In recent years I have become convinced that the domain of psychic functioning must be congruent with the domain explored by the sciences of the living inasmuch as the living is defined as autopoietic, that is: self-organized and self-maintained. For this, we must first agree that the domain of life includes systems or organisms that need not be biologically implemented. For if we adopt autopoiesis as the central criterion for defining the living, then, on top of biological organisms (individual and collective), we also find small human groups and organizations – inasmuch as they possess viable rules for their operations (rules need not be explicitly written down) –, up to society and culture in general. These indeed are all self-created entities that, since they operate according to their internal laws just as any biological organism, require a constant reassertion of their difference with regard to their environment. The environment in question is not some inert surroundings but an environment that is simultaneously nurturing and threatening, the differentiation from which is never achieved once and for all. For that reason, even as the “confidence” and the “trust” invoked by Winnicott are present within an individual system, specific conditions can threaten the individuality of the system, which means the system itself. Moreover, even in the most ordinary situations, seductions operate which lure the individual into group mentalities of which we nowadays observe various examples: political or religious sects, conspiracy theorists and so on.
Saying this, we are also called to notice that a system may, and frequently does, represent the environment for another system. This means that contradictions and conflict exist between the various levels of organization. Thus, autonomy of the individual system can be challenged by group-life requirements… In other words, any given system can either nurture or threaten another system. Nurturing requires respecting the internal laws of the nurtured system. Threat results from the lack of such respect, which in Winnicottian terms we could call excessive impingement. In the latter case, the irony is that, at the clinical level of experience – as Ferenczi (1932) clearly saw – trauma through sexual abuse and its disavowal can induce a specific sensitivity that makes the victim abler than usual to guess the predator’s desires. Hence, the internal rule of the abused child will be deviated towards pleasing and appeasing the predator. I used the t=word irony, because, in spite of appearances, this novel sensitivity is still a form of auto-regulation of the victim’s system, the objective of its submission to the other being for the sake of psychic or even physical survival.
Freud (1920,1925) defined the environment as threatening until proven otherwise. [Though we must also recall that in his unpublished Project he invoked the intervention of the Nebenmensch rescuing the baby born in a state of helplessness. Moreover, as Winnicott himself mentioned, it might well be Freud who, with his famous footnote in the 1911 paper on “The two principles…”, inspired him in stating that there is no such thing as an infant.] This conception of the surroundings is based in Freud’s implicit reference to autopoiesis, under the heading of homeostasis. The contact barriers of 1895 have been replaced, in 1920, by the stimulus barrier, but the idea is quite similar and apparently clashes with Winnicott’s idea of the environment which is, in ordinary situations, a holding environment. Indeed, Freud’s description of the dangerous environment applies to ordinary situations. His is a systemic conception about which we could say that the system knows nothing, at first, about the intentions of the helping other (Nebenmensch) and will only reach trust and confidence after some “experience of satisfaction” is obtained.
Still, even this linear description is found wanting, because, as Laplanche (1987) has theorized, the mother, and any nurturing adult in her stead, is by the same token, inadvertently seducing the child. In view of which, the alternative is not between a holding vs a toxic environment, but something that, in ordinary circumstances i.e. in the case of the ordinarily devoted mother as well, there is a mix of attachment process and generalized seduction. Obviously this does not preclude situations more extreme, where perverse, intrusive seduction can certainly yield what we may call a toxic environment. The idea here is to stress the fact that there is no holding environment that is not a seductive environment, even in the absence of gross mishandling on the part of the adults. The good-enough mother is simultaneously a sexually exciting mother and both effects obtain together around the same nurturing interactions.
It would be tempting, at this point, to consider that the difference between an ordinarily seductive environment and a toxic one lies in the possibility for an intermediate space to form. This, in fact, is totally compatible with the fact that ordinary seduction – i.e. one in which no excessive impingement or “intromission” is present – is one where the child, confronted with the, for it enigmatic sexual excitation, is left the freedom to operate its own translation of the messages emanating from the adult world. And let us immediately underline how this works well with the found/created paradox, in that the freedom of translation is precisely one where the child is not forced to reach an expected result, but is left the liberty to construct its own meanings from the cultural elements it finds in its environment, besides, that is, the exciting sexual messages. I would be also tempted here to consider that the cultural elements that will enter the child’s bricolage of infantile theories and fantasies are found in the very space Winnicott identified as the location of the cultural experience.
Let us notice, however, that Winnicott’s description of the locus for the cultural experience adds more than an additional topographical element. The locus in question, to begin with, is not really a geographical place; it is a potential space, it is a limit. And by potential, I believe we can understand that it waxes and wanes depending on whether the experience actually occurs. Hence, as a space, it can really only be pointed at in the après-coup of the experience. Thus, our attention is drawn to the experience more than to the geographical metaphor of the potential space. For someone who believes, like I do, that space metaphors are just… metaphors, whose usage tends to immobilize the dynamics of the psyche, the notion of experience gains priority, and it highlights the time dimension of psychic rather than their spatial location.
So, we are once again told about a limit, an evanescent locus that only exists when the cultural experience is happening and otherwise remains potential. This, to me, is a good representative of Winnicott’s modernity. His thinking here is truly innovative all the while it stands on firm Freudian ground as I will now try to show.
When we speak, for instance, of the cultural environment, we are naturally brought to look for the already constituted set of components – linguistic, literary, artistic, administrative, legal etc.– of what we call a culture. Winnicott, for his part, is pointing at the actual cultural experience. At this point, please bear with me as I distort a bit the term “actual” to make it a signifier of what is, well, actually occurring, not only in the sense that it is really occurring, but also that it is occurring now, i.e. in the time dimension that I dubbed “actual time”… This is a somewhat unsatisfactory translation from the French “temps actuel”… “Actual time” is a time that is “always now”; it is also a time when conscious and unconscious functioning happen without a clear delimitation between them. For I believe this is the specific nature of the cultural experience that Winnicott is alluding to, if we consider that, in his own words, it emanates from “the play of those who have not yet heard of games.” I hope we can easily agree that when children, or for that matter, adults are truly playing, they frequently if not always lose the notion of time, i.e. of chronological time, the time of the clock; the sort of time that, on the contrary, is a mandatory dimension in any game.
Let me now push this idea a bit further. Going back to Winnicott’s question of “what life itself is about”, we notice that, contrary to what is often said, life is not a game, while it is certainly inseparable from the cultural experience - which includes playing. Obviously, too often life does take the allure of a game: there are strict rules, time is counted, monetary value is put on time spent… But I think we can agree that this is not the aspect of our existence that we cherish the most, rather opting for those moments when we are not asked to justify our being there or our preferred way of spending that time; a time that we hope will not be computed. An indeterminate beach of time allowing for a creative presence to the world.
It follows that the notion of environment, when considered from the point of view of the living system, is not an already constituted set that waited for the individual system/organism to come and inhabit it, nor is it something to be created at some later moment, but something constantly in the making, constantly being recomposed from the potential, virtual or only posthumously conceivable space that “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. In other words, wherever there is a system, there is an environment. One is not thinkable without the other. That the individual forming the system may ignore the existence of the environment, this is obviously and frequently the case. Western industrialized societies did so for more than two centuries!
Let us now turn our attention to Winnicott’s notion of the individual-environment set-up as the “centre of gravity of the being”. It is true that Winnicott proposes that at some point the child acquires an “internal environment” (Depressive position, p. 8) and that this seems to draw us back to a notion of environment that was geographically outside and is now geographically inside, thus making of the individual-environment set-up something acquired and stabilized for good rather than a constant work or differentiation. So here I would like to pull Winnicott on one side of the divide and ask him to keep in line with contemporary theories of the living, where the individual-environment set-up is never really secured for good but describes a constant reiteration. Mind you, there is already in Winnicott all it takes to make that connection: the locus of the cultural experience is indeed comparable to the line or membrane that keeps reiterating the difference between individual and environment, hence constantly (re)creating the environment through the cultural experience.
I had warned that I was pulling Winnicott on one side of the fence. For if we take him seriously when he says that the individual environment set-up is the “centre of gravity”, then I suggest this is true at every level of psychic functions. This is because the notion of system/environment – or individual/environment –has what we could call a fractal quality i.e. the pattern repeats itself at every level we examine phenomena in living systems. For instance, the infant is a system (or individual) with regard to the mother as environment. At the same level, the mother is also a system and the baby can be seen as her environment (or we could include baby, father, grandmother etc., depending on what aspect we wish to study). But the mother-infant unit is also a system (or individual) and the rest of the family, or the maternity ward, or whatever comes into significant interaction with it, forms the environment.
It follows that when Winnicott says that the mother-infant unit is the center of gravity, he is implicitly saying many things: 1- that the mother-infant unit should be looked upon as an individual, a single system; 2- that, form this point of view, the infant’s process of individuation is not yet completed, which is totally congruent with the notion of Hilflösigkeit (helplessness) identified by Freud from early on. Therefore, the systemic view remains compatible also when Winnicott speaks of the creation by the child of its own internal environment. The fractal quality I just mentioned allows for the dynamic understanding of each one of Winnicott’s implementations of the term “environment” and we can follow him when he seems to describe things from different perspectives. For, to speak of an internal environment makes perfect sense within the theory of autopoïetic systems: the system “ego” has the the system “id” for is environment; and the whole psyche cab be seen as the individual in the midst of the somatic environment; psyche-soma in turn has the mother as an environment etc. And within the ego, when the notion of self becomes operative, we get a self/non-self relationship…
Having said this, I notice that Winnicott could indeed have resorted to the notion of environment in his writings about the psycho-soma and he implicitly does so when he speaks of “an indwelling of the psyche in the soma” (1971), but here I must say it is not clear if Winnicott means it literally or if he is describing the subjective experience. So here things get a bit complicated, because Winnicott’s concepts may not always parallel that of others, especially in the case of “mind”. What I mean is that I can adhere to his definition of the psyche as “the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and functions, that is, of physical aliveness”, so that psyche and soma are but two sides of the same coin. The problem is that if we ask how and by what function is the “imaginative elaboration” accomplished, one immediately thinks of… a mind. So, when Winnicott speaks of a mind as a function of the psyche-soma, he must be thinking of mind in different terms than usual. See also Winnicott and the perfect environmentLuhmann et les systèmes vivantsAutopoietic systems, Varela
202207112200
"Let us assume that health in the early development of the individual entails continuity of being. The early psyche-soma proceeds along a certain line of development provided its continuity of being is not disturbed; in other words, for the healthy development of the early psyche-soma there is a need for a perfect environment. At first the need is absolute." (1949- Mind and its relations to the psyche-soma)
It is difficult to understand this assertion by Winnicott, for where are we going to find a perfect environment? Freud, for one, always positis the environment as dangerous until the living unit finds a way of filtering its stimuli. Laplanche posits an inevitably exciting mother all the while she is nurturing and tenderly loving her baby. Moreover, it is not at all conceivable that the child would develop without some disturbance in the continuity. For, if the situation were perfect, why would the child need to develop? You could say that there are intrinsic biological forces that push the infant towards development, but we know that this is not enough in itself.
But Winnicott is not naïve to the point of positing the "perfect environment" as truly possible.
" The need for a good environment, which is absolute at first, rapidly becomes relative. The ordinary good mother is good enough. If she is good enough the infant becomes able to allow for her deficiencies by mental activity. This applies to meeting not only instinctual impulses but also all the most primitive types of ego need, even including the need for negative care or an alive neglect. The mental activity of the infant turns a good-enough environment into a perfect environment, that is to say, turns relative failure of adaptation into adaptive success. What releases the mother from her need to be near-perfect is the infant's understanding." (Ibid.)
The need that is "absolute at first" has, I believe, but an asymptotic i.e. purely ideal existence. Winnicott follows that line of thinking because he needs to arrive at the point where some of his patients have taught hime that a split occurs.
" At the present time the curious thing is that once again in medical scientific thought the brain has got equated with the mind, which is felt by a certain kind of ill person to be an enemy, and a thing in the skull. The surgeon who does a leucotomy would at first seem to be doing what the patient asks for, that is, to be relieving the patient of mind activity, the mind having become the enemy of the psyche-soma."
It is remarkable that Winnicott does not think that this "enemy" within is none that source f the drive. Links to Winnicott and the environment
Anyone who gives a look at the table of contents of Jan Abram’s extraordinary book The Language of Winnicott will immediately agree that the list of areas to which Winnicott made an original contribution is so long that it would be impossible to cover, let alone discuss, even a small fraction of them in one paper. Wishing to speak of Winnicott’s thinking with respect to the future, I therefore needed to pick one element that I thought would work as a sort of hub or crossroad for a number of other Winnicottian developments. One that speaks to me the most in that respect is the notion of environment.
The anecdote may be pure fiction, but we are told that during the war effort against Nazi Germany, at one point a member of Winston Churchill’s cabinet suggested that the government cut spending in the domain of arts and culture and redirect the funds to the military. At which point Churchill is said to have replied that this was out of the question. When asked why, he supposedly answered something like this: “What is the point of fighting the Nazis if we ourselves destroy our culture?” Again, this may be a purely imaginary story, but as the Italian saying goes, “Se non è vero, è ben trovato”: if it’s not true, it’s a damn good fiction.
This story seems to me to apply, mutatis mutandis, with something Winnicott writes in “The Location of the Cultural Experience”:
“Starting as we do from psychoneurotic illness and with ego defences related to anxiety that arises out of the instinctual life, we tend to think of health in terms of the state of ego defences. We say it is healthy when these defences are not rigid, etc. But we seldom reach the point at which we can start to describe what life is like apart from illness or absence of illness.
That is to say, we have yet to tackle the question of what life itself isabout.”
Obviously, we could object to this that to ask what life is about is not a psychoanalytic question. At least not if, as Winnicott himself has signaled at the start of his paper, we have no place in our topography for the cultural experience. But this is precisely what he was out to introduce in psychoanalysis: a place for the cultural experience based on playing, and this, to me, is one of Winnicott’s contributions by which he reveals himself a unique thinker.
Unique in many ways: as we know, he seldom uses Freud’s vocabulary, which is his prerogative though this left us with the sometimes tiresome task to reassure our colleagues that yes, Winnicott had read Freud and read him well, and that, in more than one way, he is sitting on Freud’s shoulders. I know from personal experience how costly it can be to insist that Freud and Winnicott operate on the same terrain, though with different words and concepts, and despite the inevitable theoretical clashes with Freud or other significant authors. But to me, these are not catastrophes; they are rather opportunities for doing more thinking.
As I said, the list would be quite long of all the important ideas that Winnicott introduced. But, as I already stated elsewhere, Winnicott’s concept are one thing; the other, and to me even more important thing, is Winnicott’s way thinking. Winnicott, indeed, is someone who thinks from two sides at once, or better, who thinks at the limits, or on the edge, as I will hope to show later. The notion of environment is one such term. But let’s first go back to the potential space and the location of the cultural experience.
The idea of an intermediate space where our cultural experience seems now so obvious that we may not always realize how central it is. For one thing, it does away with a static and naïve conception of two clearly distinct inner and outer world. Moreover, it results, I believe, from a more granular approach to the notion of environment – another concept that seems self-evident but which took a Winnicott to make its deserved entrance into the psychoanalytic domain.
Saying this, I do not mean that everything Winnicott writes on these two subjects is flawless. For instance, let me point right away at a problem I see in the way Winnicott locates the potential space when he situates it between “inner or personal psychic reality and […] the actual world in which the individual lives**.”** In so doing, Winnicott places himself from the standpoint of an observer external to the individual, or worse, from God’s perspective i.e. as someone who knows the difference between the two realities in-between which the cultural experience is located. But isn’t this contradictory with the fact that Winnicott is describing an experience and precisely not some hard knowledge ? After all, does any of us know the “actual world” we live in ? For sure, that world is made of other humans, i.e. of people which, at the metapsychological level, we cannot know what they “actually” are. Yet, I think we all understand what Winnicott means, because what matters most here are not the two ends of the universe he is describing, but precisely the space, or the line, in-between, and which “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. Clearly, Winnicott is here speaking of something akin to Freud’s “contact barriers”, which designate neither barriers impeding contact, nor a contact that abolishes the barriers, but something doing both things simultaneously. What I am saying is that for Winnicott to describe the potential space in the way he does in the short passage I quoted is more radical than he himself may seem to notice. For if that space both joins and separates, and if it is potential, then it raises interesting questions about the notion of knowledge. If so, it is not for nothing that Winnicott also introduces the notion of illusion, which in his thinking has nothing pejorative, quite the contrary.
The space that both joins and separates precludes any firm knowledge of the “actual world”. The latter is something that, after Winnicott’s introduction of transitional objects and potential space, can only be left for physicists to debate, and we know how even they have different, sometimes contrasted views and uncertainties on the subject. So, again, while we understand what Winnicott means, it is important to remember that the “actual world” if and when it is met directly – i.e. in the absence of the buffer zone Winnicott brought to our attention – provokes a traumatic experience. Hence, it is all the more important to get as clear a sense as possible of what the Freudian “contact barrier”, as it is used by Winnicott, is made of, or better, what is its function.
The “barrier” or the line in question, which a higher resolution also speaks of the potential space, is a defining concept not only in the Winnicottian conception, but for the definition of the domain of psychoanalysis as a whole, i.e. as a domain of life. In recent years I have become convinced that the domain of psychic functioning must be congruent with the domain explored by the sciences of the living inasmuch as the living is defined as autopoietic, that is: self-organized and self-maintained. For this, we must first agree that the domain of life includes systems or organisms that need not be biologically implemented. For if we adopt autopoiesis as the central criterion for defining the living, then, on top of biological organisms (individual and collective), we also find small human groups and organizations – inasmuch as they possess viable rules for their operations (rules need not be explicitly written down) –, up to society and culture in general. These indeed are all self-created entities that, since they operate according to their internal laws just as any biological organism, require a constant reassertion of their difference with regard to their environment. The environment in question is not some inert surroundings but an environment that is simultaneously nurturing and threatening, the differentiation from which is never achieved once and for all. For that reason, even as the “confidence” and the “trust” invoked by Winnicott are present within an individual system, specific conditions can threaten the individuality of the system, which means the system itself. Moreover, even in the most ordinary situations, seductions operate which lure the individual into group mentalities of which we nowadays observe various examples: political or religious sects, conspiracy theorists and so on.
Saying this, we are also called to notice that a system may, and frequently does, represent the environment for another system. This means that contradictions and conflict exist between the various levels of organization. Thus, autonomy of the individual system can be challenged by group-life requirements… In other words, any given system can either nurture or threaten another system. Nurturing requires respecting the internal laws of the nurtured system. Threat results from the lack of such respect, which in Winnicottian terms we could call excessive impingement. In the latter case, the irony is that, at the clinical level of experience – as Ferenczi (1932) clearly saw – trauma through sexual abuse and its disavowal can induce a specific sensitivity that makes the victim abler than usual to guess the predator’s desires. Hence, the internal rule of the abused child will be deviated towards pleasing and appeasing the predator. I used the t=word irony, because, in spite of appearances, this novel sensitivity is still a form of auto-regulation of the victim’s system, the objective of its submission to the other being for the sake of psychic or even physical survival.
Freud (1920,1925) defined the environment as threatening until proven otherwise. [Though we must also recall that in his unpublished Project he invoked the intervention of the Nebenmensch rescuing the baby born in a state of helplessness. Moreover, as Winnicott himself mentioned, it might well be Freud who, with his famous footnote in the 1911 paper on “The two principles…”, inspired him in stating that there is no such thing as an infant.] This conception of the surroundings is based in Freud’s implicit reference to autopoiesis, under the heading of homeostasis. The contact barriers of 1895 have been replaced, in 1920, by the stimulus barrier, but the idea is quite similar and apparently clashes with Winnicott’s idea of the environment which is, in ordinary situations, a holding environment. Indeed, Freud’s description of the dangerous environment applies to ordinary situations. His is a systemic conception about which we could say that the system knows nothing, at first, about the intentions of the helping other (Nebenmensch) and will only reach trust and confidence after some “experience of satisfaction” is obtained.
Still, even this linear description is found wanting, because, as Laplanche (1987) has theorized, the mother, and any nurturing adult in her stead, is by the same token, inadvertently seducing the child. In view of which, the alternative is not between a holding vs a toxic environment, but something that, in ordinary circumstances i.e. in the case of the ordinarily devoted mother as well, there is a mix of attachment process and generalized seduction. Obviously this does not preclude situations more extreme, where perverse, intrusive seduction can certainly yield what we may call a toxic environment. The idea here is to stress the fact that there is no holding environment that is not a seductive environment, even in the absence of gross mishandling on the part of the adults. The good-enough mother is simultaneously a sexually exciting mother and both effects obtain together around the same nurturing interactions.
It would be tempting, at this point, to consider that the difference between an ordinarily seductive environment and a toxic one lies in the possibility for an intermediate space to form. This, in fact, is totally compatible with the fact that ordinary seduction – i.e. one in which no excessive impingement or “intromission” is present – is one where the child, confronted with the, for it enigmatic sexual excitation, is left the freedom to operate its own translation of the messages emanating from the adult world. And let us immediately underline how this works well with the found/created paradox, in that the freedom of translation is precisely one where the child is not forced to reach an expected result, but is left the liberty to construct its own meanings from the cultural elements it finds in its environment, besides, that is, the exciting sexual messages. I would be also tempted here to consider that the cultural elements that will enter the child’s bricolage of infantile theories and fantasies are found in the very space Winnicott identified as the location of the cultural experience.
Let us notice, however, that Winnicott’s description of the locus for the cultural experience adds more than an additional topographical element. The locus in question, to begin with, is not really a geographical place; it is a potential space, it is a limit. And by potential, I believe we can understand that it waxes and wanes depending on whether the experience actually occurs. Hence, as a space, it can really only be pointed at in the après-coup of the experience. Thus, our attention is drawn to the experience more than to the geographical metaphor of the potential space. For someone who believes, like I do, that space metaphors are just… metaphors, whose usage tends to immobilize the dynamics of the psyche, the notion of experience gains priority, and it highlights the time dimension of psychic rather than their spatial location.
So, we are once again told about a limit, an evanescent locus that only exists when the cultural experience is happening and otherwise remains potential. This, to me, is a good representative of Winnicott’s modernity. His thinking here is truly innovative all the while it stands on firm Freudian ground as I will now try to show.
When we speak, for instance, of the cultural environment, we are naturally brought to look for the already constituted set of components – linguistic, literary, artistic, administrative, legal etc.– of what we call a culture. Winnicott, for his part, is pointing at the actual cultural experience. At this point, please bear with me as I distort a bit the term “actual” to make it a signifier of what is, well, actually occurring, not only in the sense that it is really occurring, but also that it is occurring now, i.e. in the time dimension that I dubbed “actual time”… This is a somewhat unsatisfactory translation from the French “temps actuel”… “Actual time” is a time that is “always now”; it is also a time when conscious and unconscious functioning happen without a clear delimitation between them. For I believe this is the specific nature of the cultural experience that Winnicott is alluding to, if we consider that, in his own words, it emanates from “the play of those who have not yet heard of games.” I hope we can easily agree that when children, or for that matter, adults are truly playing, they frequently if not always lose the notion of time, i.e. of chronological time, the time of the clock; the sort of time that, on the contrary, is a mandatory dimension in any game.
Let me now push this idea a bit further. Going back to Winnicott’s question of “what life itself is about”, we notice that, contrary to what is often said, life is not a game, while it is certainly inseparable from the cultural experience - which includes playing. Obviously, too often life does take the allure of a game: there are strict rules, time is counted, monetary value is put on time spent… But I think we can agree that this is not the aspect of our existence that we cherish the most, rather opting for those moments when we are not asked to justify our being there or our preferred way of spending that time; a time that we hope will not be computed. An indeterminate beach of time allowing for a creative presence to the world.
It follows that the notion of environment, when considered from the point of view of the living system, is not an already constituted set that waited for the individual system/organism to come and inhabit it, nor is it something to be created at some later moment, but something constantly in the making, constantly being recomposed from the potential, virtual or only posthumously conceivable space that “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. In other words, wherever there is a system, there is an environment. One is not thinkable without the other. That the individual forming the system may ignore the existence of the environment, this is obviously and frequently the case. Western industrialized societies did so for more than two centuries!
Let us now turn our attention to Winnicott’s notion of the individual-environment set-up as the “centre of gravity of the being”. It is true that Winnicott proposes that at some point the child acquires an “internal environment” (Depressive position, p. 8) and that this seems to draw us back to a notion of environment that was geographically outside and is now geographically inside, thus making of the individual-environment set-up something acquired and stabilized for good rather than a constant work or differentiation. So here I would like to pull Winnicott on one side of the divide and ask him to keep in line with contemporary theories of the living, where the individual-environment set-up is never really secured for good but describes a constant reiteration. Mind you, there is already in Winnicott all it takes to make that connection: the locus of the cultural experience is indeed comparable to the line or membrane that keeps reiterating the difference between individual and environment, hence constantly (re)creating the environment through the cultural experience.
I had warned that I was pulling Winnicott on one side of the fence. For if we take him seriously when he says that the individual environment set-up is the “centre of gravity”, then I suggest this is true at every level of psychic functions. This is because the notion of system/environment – or individual/environment –has what we could call a fractal quality i.e. the pattern repeats itself at every level we examine phenomena in living systems. For instance, the infant is a system (or individual) with regard to the mother as environment. At the same level, the mother is also a system and the baby can be seen as her environment (or we could include baby, father, grandmother etc., depending on what aspect we wish to study). But the mother-infant unit is also a system (or individual) and the rest of the family, or the maternity ward, or whatever comes into significant interaction with it, forms the environment.
It follows that when Winnicott says that the mother-infant unit is the center of gravity, he is implicitly saying many things: 1- that the mother-infant unit should be looked upon as an individual, a single system; 2- that, form this point of view, the infant’s process of individuation is not yet completed, which is totally congruent with the notion of Hilflösigkeit (helplessness) identified by Freud from early on. Therefore, the systemic view remains compatible also when Winnicott speaks of the creation by the child of its own internal environment. The fractal quality I just mentioned allows for the dynamic understanding of each one of Winnicott’s implementations of the term “environment” and we can follow him when he seems to describe things from different perspectives. For, to speak of an internal environment makes perfect sense within the theory of autopoïetic systems: the system “ego” has the the system “id” for is environment; and the whole psyche cab be seen as the individual in the midst of the somatic environment; psyche-soma in turn has the mother as an environment etc. And within the ego, when the notion of self becomes operative, we get a self/non-self relationship…
Having said this, I notice that Winnicott could indeed have resorted to the notion of environment in his writings about the psycho-soma and he implicitly does so when he speaks of “an indwelling of the psyche in the soma” (1971), but here I must say it is not clear if Winnicott means it literally or if he is describing the subjective experience. So here things get a bit complicated, because Winnicott’s concepts may not always parallel that of others, especially in the case of “mind”. What I mean is that I can adhere to his definition of the psyche as “the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and functions, that is, of physical aliveness”, so that psyche and soma are but two sides of the same coin. The problem is that if we ask how and by what function is the “imaginative elaboration” accomplished, one immediately thinks of… a mind. So, when Winnicott speaks of a mind as a function of the psyche-soma, he must be thinking of mind in different terms than usual. See also Winnicott and the perfect environmentLuhmann et les systèmes vivantsAutopoietic systems, Varela
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"Let us assume that health in the early development of the individual entails continuity of being. The early psyche-soma proceeds along a certain line of development provided its continuity of being is not disturbed; in other words, for the healthy development of the early psyche-soma there is a need for a perfect environment. At first the need is absolute." (1949- Mind and its relations to the psyche-soma)
It is difficult to understand this assertion by Winnicott, for where are we going to find a perfect environment? Freud, for one, always positis the environment as dangerous until the living unit finds a way of filtering its stimuli. Laplanche posits an inevitably exciting mother all the while she is nurturing and tenderly loving her baby. Moreover, it is not at all conceivable that the child would develop without some disturbance in the continuity. For, if the situation were perfect, why would the child need to develop? You could say that there are intrinsic biological forces that push the infant towards development, but we know that this is not enough in itself.
But Winnicott is not naïve to the point of positing the "perfect environment" as truly possible.
" The need for a good environment, which is absolute at first, rapidly becomes relative. The ordinary good mother is good enough. If she is good enough the infant becomes able to allow for her deficiencies by mental activity. This applies to meeting not only instinctual impulses but also all the most primitive types of ego need, even including the need for negative care or an alive neglect. The mental activity of the infant turns a good-enough environment into a perfect environment, that is to say, turns relative failure of adaptation into adaptive success. What releases the mother from her need to be near-perfect is the infant's understanding." (Ibid.)
The need that is "absolute at first" has, I believe, but an asymptotic i.e. purely ideal existence. Winnicott follows that line of thinking because he needs to arrive at the point where some of his patients have taught hime that a split occurs.
" At the present time the curious thing is that once again in medical scientific thought the brain has got equated with the mind, which is felt by a certain kind of ill person to be an enemy, and a thing in the skull. The surgeon who does a leucotomy would at first seem to be doing what the patient asks for, that is, to be relieving the patient of mind activity, the mind having become the enemy of the psyche-soma."
It is remarkable that Winnicott does not think that this "enemy" within is none that source f the drive. Links to Winnicott and the environment
Anyone who gives a look at the table of contents of Jan Abram’s extraordinary book The Language of Winnicott will immediately agree that the list of areas to which Winnicott made an original contribution is so long that it would be impossible to cover, let alone discuss, even a small fraction of them in one paper. Wishing to speak of Winnicott’s thinking with respect to the future, I therefore needed to pick one element that I thought would work as a sort of hub or crossroad for a number of other Winnicottian developments. One that speaks to me the most in that respect is the notion of environment.
The anecdote may be pure fiction, but we are told that during the war effort against Nazi Germany, at one point a member of Winston Churchill’s cabinet suggested that the government cut spending in the domain of arts and culture and redirect the funds to the military. At which point Churchill is said to have replied that this was out of the question. When asked why, he supposedly answered something like this: “What is the point of fighting the Nazis if we ourselves destroy our culture?” Again, this may be a purely imaginary story, but as the Italian saying goes, “Se non è vero, è ben trovato”: if it’s not true, it’s a damn good fiction.
This story seems to me to apply, mutatis mutandis, with something Winnicott writes in “The Location of the Cultural Experience”:
“Starting as we do from psychoneurotic illness and with ego defences related to anxiety that arises out of the instinctual life, we tend to think of health in terms of the state of ego defences. We say it is healthy when these defences are not rigid, etc. But we seldom reach the point at which we can start to describe what life is like apart from illness or absence of illness.
That is to say, we have yet to tackle the question of what life itself isabout.”
Obviously, we could object to this that to ask what life is about is not a psychoanalytic question. At least not if, as Winnicott himself has signaled at the start of his paper, we have no place in our topography for the cultural experience. But this is precisely what he was out to introduce in psychoanalysis: a place for the cultural experience based on playing, and this, to me, is one of Winnicott’s contributions by which he reveals himself a unique thinker.
Unique in many ways: as we know, he seldom uses Freud’s vocabulary, which is his prerogative though this left us with the sometimes tiresome task to reassure our colleagues that yes, Winnicott had read Freud and read him well, and that, in more than one way, he is sitting on Freud’s shoulders. I know from personal experience how costly it can be to insist that Freud and Winnicott operate on the same terrain, though with different words and concepts, and despite the inevitable theoretical clashes with Freud or other significant authors. But to me, these are not catastrophes; they are rather opportunities for doing more thinking.
As I said, the list would be quite long of all the important ideas that Winnicott introduced. But, as I already stated elsewhere, Winnicott’s concept are one thing; the other, and to me even more important thing, is Winnicott’s way thinking. Winnicott, indeed, is someone who thinks from two sides at once, or better, who thinks at the limits, or on the edge, as I will hope to show later. The notion of environment is one such term. But let’s first go back to the potential space and the location of the cultural experience.
The idea of an intermediate space where our cultural experience seems now so obvious that we may not always realize how central it is. For one thing, it does away with a static and naïve conception of two clearly distinct inner and outer world. Moreover, it results, I believe, from a more granular approach to the notion of environment – another concept that seems self-evident but which took a Winnicott to make its deserved entrance into the psychoanalytic domain.
Saying this, I do not mean that everything Winnicott writes on these two subjects is flawless. For instance, let me point right away at a problem I see in the way Winnicott locates the potential space when he situates it between “inner or personal psychic reality and […] the actual world in which the individual lives**.”** In so doing, Winnicott places himself from the standpoint of an observer external to the individual, or worse, from God’s perspective i.e. as someone who knows the difference between the two realities in-between which the cultural experience is located. But isn’t this contradictory with the fact that Winnicott is describing an experience and precisely not some hard knowledge ? After all, does any of us know the “actual world” we live in ? For sure, that world is made of other humans, i.e. of people which, at the metapsychological level, we cannot know what they “actually” are. Yet, I think we all understand what Winnicott means, because what matters most here are not the two ends of the universe he is describing, but precisely the space, or the line, in-between, and which “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. Clearly, Winnicott is here speaking of something akin to Freud’s “contact barriers”, which designate neither barriers impeding contact, nor a contact that abolishes the barriers, but something doing both things simultaneously. What I am saying is that for Winnicott to describe the potential space in the way he does in the short passage I quoted is more radical than he himself may seem to notice. For if that space both joins and separates, and if it is potential, then it raises interesting questions about the notion of knowledge. If so, it is not for nothing that Winnicott also introduces the notion of illusion, which in his thinking has nothing pejorative, quite the contrary.
The space that both joins and separates precludes any firm knowledge of the “actual world”. The latter is something that, after Winnicott’s introduction of transitional objects and potential space, can only be left for physicists to debate, and we know how even they have different, sometimes contrasted views and uncertainties on the subject. So, again, while we understand what Winnicott means, it is important to remember that the “actual world” if and when it is met directly – i.e. in the absence of the buffer zone Winnicott brought to our attention – provokes a traumatic experience. Hence, it is all the more important to get as clear a sense as possible of what the Freudian “contact barrier”, as it is used by Winnicott, is made of, or better, what is its function.
The “barrier” or the line in question, which a higher resolution also speaks of the potential space, is a defining concept not only in the Winnicottian conception, but for the definition of the domain of psychoanalysis as a whole, i.e. as a domain of life. In recent years I have become convinced that the domain of psychic functioning must be congruent with the domain explored by the sciences of the living inasmuch as the living is defined as autopoietic, that is: self-organized and self-maintained. For this, we must first agree that the domain of life includes systems or organisms that need not be biologically implemented. For if we adopt autopoiesis as the central criterion for defining the living, then, on top of biological organisms (individual and collective), we also find small human groups and organizations – inasmuch as they possess viable rules for their operations (rules need not be explicitly written down) –, up to society and culture in general. These indeed are all self-created entities that, since they operate according to their internal laws just as any biological organism, require a constant reassertion of their difference with regard to their environment. The environment in question is not some inert surroundings but an environment that is simultaneously nurturing and threatening, the differentiation from which is never achieved once and for all. For that reason, even as the “confidence” and the “trust” invoked by Winnicott are present within an individual system, specific conditions can threaten the individuality of the system, which means the system itself. Moreover, even in the most ordinary situations, seductions operate which lure the individual into group mentalities of which we nowadays observe various examples: political or religious sects, conspiracy theorists and so on.
Saying this, we are also called to notice that a system may, and frequently does, represent the environment for another system. This means that contradictions and conflict exist between the various levels of organization. Thus, autonomy of the individual system can be challenged by group-life requirements… In other words, any given system can either nurture or threaten another system. Nurturing requires respecting the internal laws of the nurtured system. Threat results from the lack of such respect, which in Winnicottian terms we could call excessive impingement. In the latter case, the irony is that, at the clinical level of experience – as Ferenczi (1932) clearly saw – trauma through sexual abuse and its disavowal can induce a specific sensitivity that makes the victim abler than usual to guess the predator’s desires. Hence, the internal rule of the abused child will be deviated towards pleasing and appeasing the predator. I used the t=word irony, because, in spite of appearances, this novel sensitivity is still a form of auto-regulation of the victim’s system, the objective of its submission to the other being for the sake of psychic or even physical survival.
Freud (1920,1925) defined the environment as threatening until proven otherwise. [Though we must also recall that in his unpublished Project he invoked the intervention of the Nebenmensch rescuing the baby born in a state of helplessness. Moreover, as Winnicott himself mentioned, it might well be Freud who, with his famous footnote in the 1911 paper on “The two principles…”, inspired him in stating that there is no such thing as an infant.] This conception of the surroundings is based in Freud’s implicit reference to autopoiesis, under the heading of homeostasis. The contact barriers of 1895 have been replaced, in 1920, by the stimulus barrier, but the idea is quite similar and apparently clashes with Winnicott’s idea of the environment which is, in ordinary situations, a holding environment. Indeed, Freud’s description of the dangerous environment applies to ordinary situations. His is a systemic conception about which we could say that the system knows nothing, at first, about the intentions of the helping other (Nebenmensch) and will only reach trust and confidence after some “experience of satisfaction” is obtained.
Still, even this linear description is found wanting, because, as Laplanche (1987) has theorized, the mother, and any nurturing adult in her stead, is by the same token, inadvertently seducing the child. In view of which, the alternative is not between a holding vs a toxic environment, but something that, in ordinary circumstances i.e. in the case of the ordinarily devoted mother as well, there is a mix of attachment process and generalized seduction. Obviously this does not preclude situations more extreme, where perverse, intrusive seduction can certainly yield what we may call a toxic environment. The idea here is to stress the fact that there is no holding environment that is not a seductive environment, even in the absence of gross mishandling on the part of the adults. The good-enough mother is simultaneously a sexually exciting mother and both effects obtain together around the same nurturing interactions.
It would be tempting, at this point, to consider that the difference between an ordinarily seductive environment and a toxic one lies in the possibility for an intermediate space to form. This, in fact, is totally compatible with the fact that ordinary seduction – i.e. one in which no excessive impingement or “intromission” is present – is one where the child, confronted with the, for it enigmatic sexual excitation, is left the freedom to operate its own translation of the messages emanating from the adult world. And let us immediately underline how this works well with the found/created paradox, in that the freedom of translation is precisely one where the child is not forced to reach an expected result, but is left the liberty to construct its own meanings from the cultural elements it finds in its environment, besides, that is, the exciting sexual messages. I would be also tempted here to consider that the cultural elements that will enter the child’s bricolage of infantile theories and fantasies are found in the very space Winnicott identified as the location of the cultural experience.
Let us notice, however, that Winnicott’s description of the locus for the cultural experience adds more than an additional topographical element. The locus in question, to begin with, is not really a geographical place; it is a potential space, it is a limit. And by potential, I believe we can understand that it waxes and wanes depending on whether the experience actually occurs. Hence, as a space, it can really only be pointed at in the après-coup of the experience. Thus, our attention is drawn to the experience more than to the geographical metaphor of the potential space. For someone who believes, like I do, that space metaphors are just… metaphors, whose usage tends to immobilize the dynamics of the psyche, the notion of experience gains priority, and it highlights the time dimension of psychic rather than their spatial location.
So, we are once again told about a limit, an evanescent locus that only exists when the cultural experience is happening and otherwise remains potential. This, to me, is a good representative of Winnicott’s modernity. His thinking here is truly innovative all the while it stands on firm Freudian ground as I will now try to show.
When we speak, for instance, of the cultural environment, we are naturally brought to look for the already constituted set of components – linguistic, literary, artistic, administrative, legal etc.– of what we call a culture. Winnicott, for his part, is pointing at the actual cultural experience. At this point, please bear with me as I distort a bit the term “actual” to make it a signifier of what is, well, actually occurring, not only in the sense that it is really occurring, but also that it is occurring now, i.e. in the time dimension that I dubbed “actual time”… This is a somewhat unsatisfactory translation from the French “temps actuel”… “Actual time” is a time that is “always now”; it is also a time when conscious and unconscious functioning happen without a clear delimitation between them. For I believe this is the specific nature of the cultural experience that Winnicott is alluding to, if we consider that, in his own words, it emanates from “the play of those who have not yet heard of games.” I hope we can easily agree that when children, or for that matter, adults are truly playing, they frequently if not always lose the notion of time, i.e. of chronological time, the time of the clock; the sort of time that, on the contrary, is a mandatory dimension in any game.
Let me now push this idea a bit further. Going back to Winnicott’s question of “what life itself is about”, we notice that, contrary to what is often said, life is not a game, while it is certainly inseparable from the cultural experience - which includes playing. Obviously, too often life does take the allure of a game: there are strict rules, time is counted, monetary value is put on time spent… But I think we can agree that this is not the aspect of our existence that we cherish the most, rather opting for those moments when we are not asked to justify our being there or our preferred way of spending that time; a time that we hope will not be computed. An indeterminate beach of time allowing for a creative presence to the world.
It follows that the notion of environment, when considered from the point of view of the living system, is not an already constituted set that waited for the individual system/organism to come and inhabit it, nor is it something to be created at some later moment, but something constantly in the making, constantly being recomposed from the potential, virtual or only posthumously conceivable space that “initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother”. In other words, wherever there is a system, there is an environment. One is not thinkable without the other. That the individual forming the system may ignore the existence of the environment, this is obviously and frequently the case. Western industrialized societies did so for more than two centuries!
Let us now turn our attention to Winnicott’s notion of the individual-environment set-up as the “centre of gravity of the being”. It is true that Winnicott proposes that at some point the child acquires an “internal environment” (Depressive position, p. 8) and that this seems to draw us back to a notion of environment that was geographically outside and is now geographically inside, thus making of the individual-environment set-up something acquired and stabilized for good rather than a constant work or differentiation. So here I would like to pull Winnicott on one side of the divide and ask him to keep in line with contemporary theories of the living, where the individual-environment set-up is never really secured for good but describes a constant reiteration. Mind you, there is already in Winnicott all it takes to make that connection: the locus of the cultural experience is indeed comparable to the line or membrane that keeps reiterating the difference between individual and environment, hence constantly (re)creating the environment through the cultural experience.
I had warned that I was pulling Winnicott on one side of the fence. For if we take him seriously when he says that the individual environment set-up is the “centre of gravity”, then I suggest this is true at every level of psychic functions. This is because the notion of system/environment – or individual/environment –has what we could call a fractal quality i.e. the pattern repeats itself at every level we examine phenomena in living systems. For instance, the infant is a system (or individual) with regard to the mother as environment. At the same level, the mother is also a system and the baby can be seen as her environment (or we could include baby, father, grandmother etc., depending on what aspect we wish to study). But the mother-infant unit is also a system (or individual) and the rest of the family, or the maternity ward, or whatever comes into significant interaction with it, forms the environment.
It follows that when Winnicott says that the mother-infant unit is the center of gravity, he is implicitly saying many things: 1- that the mother-infant unit should be looked upon as an individual, a single system; 2- that, form this point of view, the infant’s process of individuation is not yet completed, which is totally congruent with the notion of Hilflösigkeit (helplessness) identified by Freud from early on. Therefore, the systemic view remains compatible also when Winnicott speaks of the creation by the child of its own internal environment. The fractal quality I just mentioned allows for the dynamic understanding of each one of Winnicott’s implementations of the term “environment” and we can follow him when he seems to describe things from different perspectives. For, to speak of an internal environment makes perfect sense within the theory of autopoïetic systems: the system “ego” has the the system “id” for is environment; and the whole psyche cab be seen as the individual in the midst of the somatic environment; psyche-soma in turn has the mother as an environment etc. And within the ego, when the notion of self becomes operative, we get a self/non-self relationship…
Having said this, I notice that Winnicott could indeed have resorted to the notion of environment in his writings about the psycho-soma and he implicitly does so when he speaks of “an indwelling of the psyche in the soma” (1971), but here I must say it is not clear if Winnicott means it literally or if he is describing the subjective experience. So here things get a bit complicated, because Winnicott’s concepts may not always parallel that of others, especially in the case of “mind”. What I mean is that I can adhere to his definition of the psyche as “the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and functions, that is, of physical aliveness”, so that psyche and soma are but two sides of the same coin. The problem is that if we ask how and by what function is the “imaginative elaboration” accomplished, one immediately thinks of… a mind. So, when Winnicott speaks of a mind as a function of the psyche-soma, he must be thinking of mind in different terms than usual. See also Winnicott and the perfect environmentLuhmann et les systèmes vivantsAutopoietic systems, Varela
La notion de différance chez Derrida, sur laquelle s’appuie aussi Luhmann, équivaut à celle de clôture opérationelle chez Varela ainsi qu'au rapport individu/environnement chez Simondon. Chose à remarquer, Luhman définit n système ainsi: un système est la différence entre système et environnement.
La notion de différance chez Derrida, sur laquelle s’appuie aussi Luhmann, équivaut à celle de clôture opérationelle chez Varela ainsi qu'au rapport individu/environnement chez Simondon. Chose à remarquer, Luhman définit n système ainsi: un système est la différence entre système et environnement.
La notion de différance chez Derrida, sur laquelle s’appuie aussi Luhmann, équivaut à celle de clôture opérationelle chez Varela ainsi qu'au rapport individu/environnement chez Simondon. Chose à remarquer, Luhman définit n système ainsi: un système est la différence entre système et environnement.
La notion de différance chez Derrida, sur laquelle s’appuie aussi Luhmann, équivaut à celle de clôture opérationelle chez Varela ainsi qu'au rapport individu/environnement chez Simondon. Chose à remarquer, Luhman définit n système ainsi: un système est la différence entre système et environnement.