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Winnicott, like Balint, treated the therapeutic aspects of regression in the context of a revised object-relations psychopathology, where psychological illness of infancy is seen as an expression of environmental failure. As the result of traumatic impingement and the failures of basic provision at the beginning, psychotic anxieties (or ‘primitive agonies’ as they came to be described) precipitate a series of defensive manoeuvres (‘reactions’), whereby the infant seeks to protect its core self. (Winnicott 1962). Illustrative of infant’s stilted freedom of drive experience and expression, in response to mother’s anxiety is Winnicott’s (Winnicott and Hügel 1967) intervention with an infant who refused the breastfeed when he was in the presence of his father. Winnicott speculated about the influence of the mother’s anxiety and conflicts about her femininity, and a precocious ‘superego element’ in the baby. During one session, Winnicott decided to put his own hand between the mother’s nipple and the baby’s mouth, as a way of displacing the infant’s aggression, and he carefully observed the baby’s subsequent willingness to be breastfed again, reorganizing his body ego. Additionally, by using a very detailed observation of oral behavior and the use of his fingers with the infant, Winnicott shed some light on the relationship of oral aggressiveness and destructiveness to early ego development. When two sensations, an oral one and a tactile one, are aroused simultaneously by finger sucking, the infant’s body surface, the skin, is partially at the service of the oral instinct and of autoerotic pleasure. Winnicott cites previous Willy Hoffer’s (1949) contribution of how relieving tension by tactile sensation, allied to the mouth, leads to the first achievement of the primitive ego, which is in this way differentiated from the id. Together with Guntrip (1961, 1968), Winnicott (1954, 1960) is generally regarded as having emphasized the essential importance of a failure of the mothering object in the early etiology of pathological development, which may result in the constellation of the false self: externally oriented, and basically inauthentic as opposed to the true self, implying integration of the individual’s internal world. Moreover, Winnicott’s treatises on developmental value of aggression (1950), use of the object (1969) and his theories of transitional phenomena (Winnicott 1953, 1965), and transference-countertransference (1949) have wide ranging applicability in studies of development, clinical theory and technique and interdisciplinary studies of creativity and art, and has been influential in the work of Margaret Mahler, Hans Loewald, Arnold Modell, Christine Anzieu-Premmereur and others. III. Bbf. Sándor Ferenczi and Michael Balint: Primary Object-love The tradition of object-relations thinking of Sandor Ferenczi and the Budapest school entered international psychoanalysis through the contribution of Michael Balint. The relational view of human nature is combined here with a drive-based, pleasure-oriented view of human motivation, a combination which Balint saw as theoretically and clinically irreducible. The theory of primary love and the concomitant use of regression as a therapeutic agent form the basis of Balint’s (1937) psychoanalytic thought. The experience of primary love is
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