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awareness, as well as projective and introjective processes, active at birth. For her, the infant at this stage is having experiences. In Winnicott’s second book of collected papers written in late 1950’s – early 1960’s “The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment” (Winnicott, 1965), the focus on maturational processes that need to be furthered along by an environment that facilitates their growth can be seen in full color. Comparing his own position to that of Klein, Winnicott (1960) remarks that Klein acknowledged the importance of the environment in the earliest stages of development in a sense that “her work on the splitting defence mechanisms and on projections and introjections and so on, is an attempt to state the effects of failure of environmental provision in terms of the individual” (p. 50). However, for Winnicott, there was not an individual without an environment. While Freud, Klein, and Bion were unearthing the complexities of the Oedipus situation, Winnicott was conceptualizing a pre -Oedipal state of being, where the mother and the infant form a single unit initially. Instead of innate conflict, Winnicott focused his attention on environmental deprivation . The (Pre-Oedipal) infant’s state of being is Winnicott’s core concern. For him, development does not ride essentially on conflict and its resolution, but more on being and its continuity. III. F. Self Psychology, Relational and Intersubjective Perspectives In other psychoanalytic models – mainly those based on self and object relations – issues relating to conflict have a minor role in understanding psychopathology and in carrying on an analytic treatment (Busch 2005; Canestri 2005; Smith 2005). In this model, instead of conflict, what is taken into account for explaining severe psychopathologies is a deficit that takes place in the early undifferentiated stages of development. Self Psychology and post Self Psychology developments (Kohut 1977; Ornstein and Ornstein 2005) as well as, relational and intersubjective schools (Harris 2005), question the centrality of unconscious intrapsychic conflict; instead, they ascribe severe psychopathologies to psychic deficit , thus extending the origins of psychopathology to the stages of development in which the differentiation between self-representation and object-representation has not yet been established. Hence, also the differentiation of the three psychic structures in which conflict develops (the id, the ego, and the superego) becomes faulty. According to this view, the needs at stake in the pathological process refer mainly to developmental failures: traumatic suffering, losses and, in general, the absence of an emotionally responsive object impair the development of the ego structure; this result implies much more than impairments resultant from derivatives of libidinal and aggressive drives. Unlike the pathology based on conflict, that takes place among systems (inter- systemic), pathology based on deficit is referred to failures in the structure of the self (intra- systemic). Concerns about developmental failures and deficit psychopathology are widely shared among contemporary post-Freudian and post-Kleinian psychoanalytic schools. Even
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