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For Winnicott, it is the environment which allows for the possibility of experiencing drives, or enables the infant to make use of instinct: “it is not instinctual satisfaction that makes a baby begin to be…It is the self that must precede the self’s use of instinct” (1967b, p.116). The environment’s (mother’s) reliable presence enables the baby to become more and more bold in the experiencing of ‘id-drives’. Under the conditions of ‘good enough’ maternal provision, thus freed up instinctual endowment provides the backing for further development of object-relating and object-use early in life. Accordingly, throughout life, the individual’s freedom to make use of instinctual drives varies. (1967a,b,1969, 1971). 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 inhibited freedom of drive experience and expression, in response to mother’s anxiety is Winnicott’s (Winnicott 1967c) 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 the oral behavior of the infant and the use of his own hand 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.
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