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illusion that her breast is part of the infant…that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant’s own capacity to create…the breast is created by the infant over and over again out of the infant’s capacity to love or (one can say) out of need” (1951: 12-4). The correspondence or overlap embodied in illusion (cf. Milner 1952; 1977), the infant’s sense that what he creates really exists “(as a ‘subjective object’ rather than an ‘object objectively perceived’), sustains the vital continuity of being, and in turn constitutes the area of experience to which ‘transitional objects’ and ‘transitional phenomena’ belong. Illusion is part of an emotional process, which includes the graduated withdrawal of illusion; hence the unitary process of illusion-disillusionment. The mother’s heightened responsiveness (‘primary maternal preoccupation’) to the infant’s initial want-to-be gives way to the gradual failure of adaptation as a further condition of development. Failure of adaptation at this stage is not a failure of reliability so much as an expression of the good-enough fallible mother, who proceeds with the process of disillusionment by presenting the object-world to her baby in small, manageable doses. This process enables the separating-out of the object- world from the infant’s emergent sense of self: “From a state of being merged in with the mother the baby is at a stage of separating out the mother from the self, and the mother is lowering the degree of her adaptation to the baby’s needs” (1971: 126). 2. Winnicott, like Balint, treated the therapeutic aspects of regression in the context of a revised object-relations psychopathology, with a clear insistence in Winnicott’s case that babies become ill. Psychological illness is seen as an expression of environmental failure, which, according to Winnicott, “can be severely crippling” and includes: infantile schizophrenia or autism; latent schizophrenia; false-self defence; and schizoid personality (1962a: 58-59). 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 (1963c) elaborated on these primitive states in his posthumously published paper, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, as follows: a return to an unintegrated state (defence: disintegration); falling forever (defence: self-holding); failure of indwelling (defence: depersonalization); loss of the sense of reality (defence: exploitation of primary narcissism); and loss of the capacity for object-relatedness (defence: autistic states, relating only to self-phenomena). Most importantly, he postulated that psychotic illness is “a defence organization relative to a primitive agony” (1963c: 90). 3. Winnicott introduced therapeutic techniques that allow for regression alongside “ordinary analysis as designed for the management of the depressive position and of the Oedipus complex in interpersonal relationships” (1954: 294). In terms of ‘ordinary analysis’, in his paper ‘The Aims of Psycho-Analytical Treatment’ Winnicott confirms that “I am all the time manoeuvring into the position for standard analysis” (1962b: 166). And by ‘standard analysis’ he means “communicating with the patient from the position in which the transference neurosis (or psychosis) puts me” (1962b: 166). In this position or situation, the analyst is simultaneously a subjective object for the patient and a reliable internal setting based on reality-testing.
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