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Provided that the mother’s adaptation is good enough, that she presents herself in a manner and at a moment that “corresponds to the infant’s capacity to create” (Winnicott, 1953, p 12), the infant has the fantasy of creating the breast. The breast is a “subjective object”, created omnipotently by the baby. Without this illusion, writes Winnicott, “no contact is possible between the psyche and the environment” (Winnicott, 1952, p 223). The experience of omnipotence, of illusion, is the foundation both for the rudimentary sense of self and for a personal, creative relation to the world. The alternative is a reactive relation to it, based on adaptation, where the personal impulse is absent and the vitality is absent. In this situation the child relates to the world from a false self position, which lead to a sense of futility and to a thwarted development of the capacity for symbol formation and the use of transitional objects. The question of disillusionment, of loss of omnipotence and the entrance of the reality principle comes later. Without primary illusion the process of disillusionment loses its meaning. “The mother’s eventual task,” writes Winnicott, “is gradually to disillusion the infant, but she has no hope of success unless at first she has been able to give sufficient opportunity for illusion” (1953, p 11). It can be observed that in Winnicott’s theory of the very beginnings of mental life there is a sort of dual track model. For the infant states of non-separateness alternate with states of an incipient sense of separateness, a vague realisation of something that is not me, especially when needs are not met and when muscular activity (which Winnicott associates with aggression) meets a resistance. “In this respect,” he writes, “the baby can meet the reality principle here and there, now and then, but not everywhere all at once; that is, the baby retains areas of subjective objects along with other areas in which there is some relating to objectively perceived objects, or ‘not-me’ (‘non-I’) objects” (1962, p 57). Thus the infant oscillates between these two states, but again, the important thing here is that the infant is given opportunities for the illusion of creating the object, which is the original basis for the development of a sense of personal self. The function of the false self is to protect the true self from exploitation and to handle the relation to the environment. Winnicott describes degrees of false self organizations: “At one extreme: the False Self sets up as real and it is this that observers tend to think is the real person. In living relationships … however the False Self begins to fail … the True Self is hidden … Less extreme: the False Self defends the True Self… [which] is acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a secret life … More towards health: the False Self has as its main concern a search for conditions which will make it possible for the True Self to come into its own. If conditions cannot be found then there must be reorganized a new defence against exploitation of the True Self … In health: The False Self is represented by the whole organization of the polite and mannered social attitude, a ‘not wearing the heart on the sleeve’” (1960b, p 142- 143). An aspect of the false self and its premature holding function that Winnicott (1949) points out, is when “the thinking of the individual begins to take over and organise the caring for the psyche-soma, whereas in health it is the function of the environment to do this…[t]he psyche gets ‘seduced’ into the mind [the intellect] from the intimate relationship that the psyche
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