Winnicott’s ‘holding’ - Winnicott first used the term ‘holding environment’ (1953, 1971) to describe the optimal environment for ‘good enough’ parenting. Throughout our lives we are dependent on Caveat | 150). Parallel Symbols in the Work of Eric Voegelin and Donald Winnicott, Voegelin                                                         Winnicott, Primary experience of the cosmos                           Experience of being, moment of illusion, Existential virtues of faith, hope, love,                      Trust, hope, faith, Play, freedom with mythical symbolism                     Preverbal and symbolic play/fantasy, creative living, In-Between (metaxy) of mutual human                     Potential space, transitional, and divine participation                                            phenomena, culture, True self under God, open to first reality;                 True self/sacred, silent core of self. away from its state of one-ness with the mother. He also was the first to use the term “philosopher.”  Voegelin interprets the fragments as indicating that “human wisdom consists in the consciousness of a limitation in comparison with the divine” and the “philosopher” for Heraclitus as one who is engaged in the search for the One that is wise (pp. Interpreting such research, Stern (1985) suggests that in the first two months of life the infant experiences primitive patterns of experience emerging and coalescing into larger “self-invariant and other-invariant constellations” (p. 67). (Winnicott 1962, p. 62), We are concerned with an infant in a highly dependent state and totally unaware of this dependence . D.Winnicott va donc étudier très concrètement ce qui se joue dans la dyade mère-enfant. . The mother's role is thus first to create illusion that allows early 2, The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge, LA:  Louisiana State University Press). According to Voegelin, mythical symbolism and its refinement in more abstract metaphors are the precise instruments for articulating the single experiential constant that is expressed in all forms of symbolism of human participation in being. * Creative techniques * Stress Management . Ogden (1990) provides the example of a mother helping a boy of two-and-one-half years take a bath, after his head has gotten under the water on a previous evening, by inviting him to “pour me some tea.”  Emerging from a tense, fearful state, the boy picks up an empty shampoo bottle and begins to use it to pour “milk” into his mother’s “teacup” to cool her “tea.”  The child has a sufficient capacity to experience being to be able to relax and become absorbed in the drama of the play. The mother gives the baby a brief period in which omnipotence is a matter of experience. * Using humor false, contracted self and second reality                   expressed in creative living, play, that result from imaginative projection and                and communication with subjective, eclipse first reality                                                      objects; false, compliant self that lives through fantasizing. Maida Vale, London, of being found instead of being placed by the subject in the world. Guest articles | Voegelin, E. (1963), “What is History?” in What is History? Guestbook | As I understand it, the term “transcendence” refers most broadly to those experiences in which, as we focus our attention on any aspect of reality, a “more” emerges into our awareness. * SIFT Model Holding, handling et object presenting. Top | . . First, he symbolizes the fact that our experience of participating in reality transcends all that we can communicate with language that refers to objects in the external world. Students | Aristotle adds to the exegesis of the noetic desire for the ground and the attraction by the ground the symbol of mutual participation (metalepsis) of two entities called nous. ”. There is nothing mystical about this. * Politics The trust in the Cosmos and its depth is the source of the premises-be it the generality of human nature or, in our case, the reality of the process as a moving presence-that we accept as the context of meaning for our concrete engagement in the search of truth.” (p. 132-3). "The good-enough mother...starts off with an almost complete At about two months the emerging self and other constellations coalesce into an organizing experiential perspective that Stern calls a sense of a core self and other. True self, false self, Winnicott, D. (1953). The task of relating these two areas never ends and is manifested in all of human culture: “It is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience … which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.) In object relations theory, Winnicott believed that there was no such thing as an infant, ... such as inadequate holding, handling and object-presenting (Winnicott, 1962; 1963). Aristotle assumes that the apprehending participation of the human nous in the ground of being is only made possible by “the preceding genetic participation of the divine in the human nous” (p. 150). According to Voegelin, experiences of transcendence occur in ancient societies that symbolize reality solely in mythical terms, but the various realms of being are not clearly distinguished and acts of transcendence are not recognized as such, if they occur at all. (Voegelin 1957b, p. 259-61). * Culture Omnipotence is nearly a fact of experience. Second, for Voegelin philosophy is the therapy of order. * Power As Voegelin describes the experience in the fourth volume of his magnum opus, Order and History: “The cosmos of the primary experience is neither the external world of objects given to a subject of cognition, nor is it the world that has been created by a world-transcendent God. In P. Lomas (Ed. Transition Object may play a significant The ordinary, good-enough mother’s holding and handling of her baby keeps his experience of annihilation anxieties at tolerable levels and, in interaction with his inborn maturational tendencies, allows the infant to come into existence as a person who can desire and experience frustration. Holding and Handling Leading to Integration and Personalization. Voegelin argues that Heraclitus, Aeschylus, and Plato, by carefully observing the process by which “they arrived at more differentiated experiences engendering more differentiated symbols,” developed the “symbol of a ‘depth‘ of the soul from which a new truth of reality can be hauled up to conscious experience  . . With respect to the first problem, recent research by developmental psychologists suggests that the infant has some awareness of self and other from the beginning of life. the ‘pure’ experience. and ed. completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to deal with * Habit Antrittsvorlesung von PD Dr. phil. for any length of time. He took a softer approach than such as When impingements do not force the infant or young child to become prematurely and traumatically aware of his separateness and dependence, he can experience being and explore the interpersonal and physical world around him through play. Third, he says that an essential feature of healthy interpersonal relationships, and especially of psychotherapy, is our tolerance and respect for the transcendence of the other. These three senses of self and other (as well as a fourth, the verbal sense of self and other, which begins to emerge between 15 and 18 months) are present throughout life. According to Voegelin, a philosopher must inevitably use metaphors to articulate his differentiated understanding of reality, and those metaphors differ from the more compact narratives of mythical symbolism only insofar as they reflect a greater critical awareness of the symbolizing process and render more explicit the meanings expressed more compactly in the myth. Voegelin contends that all philosophical exegeses of the experience of participation must employ mythical symbolism. However differentiated the language we use to interpret the experience of participation, we must not forget that participation has an immediate dimension. These limitations prevent him from exploring the In-Between, the true self, and the existential virtues as completely as Voegelin does. In a later paper (Winnicott 1963), Winnicott argues that psychoanalysts must allow a positive role in development and therapy for silence in the presence of others, which he says is a nondefensive form of not communicating with them. Computer layout | This interpretation of Aristotle indicates Voegelin’s view that man’s participation in being is not random or diffuse but is structured from within as a movement or tension toward divine Being. International Thanks for a great service. Culture Education Philosophy Politics Voegelin, Biography Collected Works Excerpts Voegelin Audio Voegelin Videos Resources, About VoegelinView Announcements Archive Forthcoming Submissions Staff Donate, Following the Gaze: Beatrice’s Eyes and Beauty in The Divine Comedy, More or Less: Utopia as a Meditation on Human Nature, Marx’ World View – Conjectures and Aberrations. Winnicott, D.W. (1952a), “Anxiety Associated with Insecurity,” in Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis, 97-100. Tracing the exegesis backward, we therefore must say:  Without the kinesis of being attracted by the ground, there would be no desire for it; without the desire, no questioning in confusion; without questioning in confusion, no awareness of ignorance. Winnicott, D.W. (1971a), Human Nature (New York:  Schocken Books, 1988). * Self-development letting go comes in small and digestible steps, in which a (Voegelin 1956, p. 1). against that which is unthinkable, the exploitation of the True Self, which would result in its annihilation.” (Winnicott 1960, pp. child is never completely isolated. accepting and surviving this onslaught with equanimity. Voegelin, E. (1970) “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” in Published Essays 1966-1985, 115-133. 26-33). “But whoever is perplexed (aporon) and wonders (thaumazon) is conscious (oetai) of being ignorant (agnoein)” (Met. As the early Hellenic philosophers explored the order of the psyche, they achieved this critical awareness, which enabled them to play with mythical symbols with greater freedom than their predecessors. – Changes Zur Dynamik des sog. Since healthy individuals continue to exercise those capacities throughout life, I interpret him as saying that openness to the cosmic primary experience is the foundation of psychological health. Small font | Although the quest implies a component of direction, it still may miss its goal (telos) or be satisfied with a false one. Winnicott, D.W. (1945), “Primitive Emotional Development,” in Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis, 145-156. This helped popularize his teachings, especially Creativity, Play, Transitional Phenomena, and the In-Between of Potential Space. > Concepts In this paper I use Voegelin’s work to interpret the theories of human development and psychotherapy of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), whom I regard as the most important psychoanalyst since Freud. That work reflects the influence of Winnicott’s ideas, and Winnicott read it in typescript and praised it highly in correspondence with Laing. Racker, H. (1968), Transference and Countertransference (New York:  International Universities Press). Laing, R.D. If we drop the assumption of initial unawareness of separateness, a second problem remains:  how do we know that the infant’s experience is like ours? There would be a hallucination of the object if there were memory material for use in the process of creation but this cannot be postulated in consideration of the theoretical first feed. Holding, handling, and object presenting each support the infant’s development of a distinct psychological capacity that Winnicott believes to be fundamental to healthy living. Philosophizing is a healing process in which ever greater insight into the disorder of one’s soul goes hand in hand with ever more open responsiveness to the pull of transcendent truth. The False Self . * Counseling As long as the Second Reality carries the index of “bad faith,” as long as it remains a play at insanity, we have to speak of a spiritual disorder; when the Second Reality acquires the index of “good faith,” the play will change over into an honest psychosis.” (pp. The knowledge of the premise, however, comes not from the concrete experience of essence on the part of the respective noetic or pneumatic person, but from the cosmic primary experience, in which things are already experienced as participating-men as men, and gods and gods-even when we do not know too well what precisely they are. The intracosmic analogies used by ancient societies make sense only on the assumption that the various partners in the community of being are consubstantial. Sense of self and other are no longer only core entities of physical presence, action, affect, and continuity. What is constant is this process of truth emerging from the depth that “leaves a trail of equivalent symbols in time and space” (p. 132). He suggests that part of the answer can be found in the phenomenon of play: “Sanity is a play . * Sequential requests In so doing, he appeals to our experience of the oneness, continuity, lastingness, and order of reality-that is, to what Voegelin calls the primary experience of the cosmos. The mother can be viewed as a 'container' for the infant's bad objects, as (Voegelin 1956, p. xiv)  The philosopher does not start his inquiry from scratch but from the symbols in his social environment that have been developed to articulate that order. * Beliefs others, seeking company and belonging. Here the new human being is in the position of creating the world. Webmasters | If all goes well, the client is able to reach a state of “desultory formless functioning” (Winnicott 1971b, p. 64) that corresponds to the unintegrated but nonanxious states that occur when the mother’s holding enables the infant to have the experience of being. Quick Links |, © Changing Works 2002- Voegelin, E. (1989), Autobiographical Reflections (Baton Rouge, LA:  Louisiana State University Press). ‘The whole realm of the spiritual (daimonion) is halfway indeed between (metaxy) god and man . Voegelin, E. (1956), Order and History, vol. There he symbolizes existence as “the drama of being” in which we play our part while knowing fully neither what the drama itself or we ourselves are. A philosopher like Aristotle or Voegelin articulates the directional movement in consciousness, the tension toward the ground of being, in experience-near symbols. We now are in a position to ask, what can we discern as the experiential sources of Winnicott’s work? 225-6). In my reading I have seen no evidence that he was a mystic in the sense of someone who experiences acts of transcendence. Robert S. (Robin) Seiler, Jr., is a psychotherapist in private practice in Maryland. That constant element is the experience of all the areas of reality as consubstantial. Voegelin takes from Laing the idea that a person who functions fairly well in society may suffer from a schizoid condition, that is, a profound division in his experience of himself and others. mother's face will become fixed or her mood will dominate, and my own personal (Winnicott 1971a, p. 102). The three capacities develop synchronically. baby, thus giving it a sense of control, Philosophizing involves a meditative descent into the depths of the psyche in search of the experiences that motivated such symbols and a meditative ascent from the depths in search of a more differentiated language with which to interpret those experiences and symbols and, thereby, bring the order of being to essential clarity. * Research . A second theme is the similarity between the core problems addressed by Voegelin and Winnicott and the remarkable equivalence between many of their symbols. 4, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge, LA:  Louisiana State University Press). I think of the process as if two lines came from opposite directions, liable to come near each other. Blog! Here we touch on the existential virtues in Voegelin’s sense as the experiential source of human community, a theme first sounded by Heraclitus (Voegelin 1956a), and the roots of those virtues in the primary experience of the cosmos. The infant may respond to these environmental provisions, but the result in the baby is maximal personal maturation. . Mythical symbolism, with its rich field of sensuous images and tales, is permeated by play, but lacks critical awareness of the function of play in creating worlds of meaning. Holding, Handling, Object presenting Sitzung am 11.Juni 2008 • 1. * Public speaking * Workplace design, * Assertiveness He suggested that emotional problems developed when a person had been deprived such holding environments in childhood and that a level of holding was critical to the therapeutic environment. (1991), “From Delusion to Play,” Clinical Social Work Journal, Vol. In interpreting such experience-near symbols, a philosopher will inevitably use more abstract symbols in sentences that have the grammatical structure of everyday language, in which we use verbs to link subjects and objects. . Hence, the symbols of the myth, in which the reverberations are expressed, can be defined as the refraction of the unconscious in the medium of objectifying consciousness. To reach this statement, he assumes that “in health there is a core to the personality that corresponds to the true self of the split personality.”  This “incommunicado element” at the center of the person “is truly personal,” “feels real,” and is sacred and most worth preserving . . Inquiry in this area would include exploration of the differentiation of the height of the psyche as part of the healing process. * Sociology The 'not good enough' mother leads to 'false The myth told by Diatoma and reported by Socrates articulates the erotic tension in the soul of the philosopher, his longing for truth that is both an awareness of ignorance and poverty and an anticipation of fullness and knowledge. independence. The movements of the depth reverberate in the conscious subject without becoming objects for it. I then considered their collision with a Home | Without that premise, the noetic experiences would remain a biographical curiosity; only with the premise as background do they attain their ordering function in society and history, inasmuch as the premise is the basis of the claim that they are representative and binding for all men. .The holding environment . In such societies, reality is symbolized as an embracing whole that is comprised of the four areas of the gods, man, the world, and society, all of which are symbolized compactly in terms of analogies with each other. . Three key aspects of the environment identified by Winnicott are holding, The mother may thus hold the child, handle it his or her capacity to allow for events." 150-1). It belongs to being alive. * Listening The final phase of development, to independence, is 'never absolute' as the comfort and then to create disillusion that gradually introduces the Winnicott identifie trois fonctions maternelles, indispensables pour le développement harmonieux de l'enfant : - l'object-presenting (la présentation de l'objet) : la mère, en étant là, présente au bon moment, permet à l'enfant de lui attribuer une existence réelle mais aussi d'éprouver l'illusion qu'il crée l'objet. Quick | È importante che nelle prime fasi dello The first period, extending from birth to about five or six months, he refers to as the period of “primitive emotional development” (Winnicott 1945). Winnicott As an older child and adult, he will be prone to excessive experience of those anxieties. Winnicott mentions contemplation favorably, but as far as I know there is no evidence that he engaged in regular meditative practice (although the practice of psychotherapy involves experiences of transcendence that nourish the psyche). Thus, a king’s rule over a territory and its people may be symbolized as an analogue of divine rule over the cosmos, or the king himself as a god or perhaps a son of god. inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition . . Winnicott describes the holding environment as a developmental stage in which the child and mother are one entity, as yet undifferentiated in the infant’s consciousness. * Decisions This allows us to make sense of Winnicott’s statements that “[f]antasy [participation in reality] is more primary than reality [the world of existent things], and the enrichment of fantasy [symbolizing] with the world’s riches depends on the experience of illusion [participation in reality],” and that the moment of illusion is “a bit of experience which the infant can take [when his capacities have matured sufficiently] as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality.” (Winnicott 1945, p. 153, 152). Where the complications are not too great something very simple happens. transparent for the mystery of existence over the abyss of nonexistence.” (p. 72), For Voegelin, philosophical symbols that seek to explicate the consubstantiality of man and the reality of which he is a part, including the reality of other men, have their source in the primary experience and emerge from and are continuous with more compact mythical symbols. Winnicott’s symbol fantasying is equivalent to Voegelin’s symbol imaginary construction. . In the stage of holding, the empathy of the mother, her "alive adaptation" for her baby's needs and her primary maternal preoccupation are responses to the unintegrated state of the infant. This passage expresses Voegelin’s view that the sources of man’s knowledge of the reality in which he participates are the experiences of faith, hope, love, and trust. This holding environment allows the infant to transition at its own rate to a more autonomous position. mother is neither good nor bad nor the product of illusion, but is a separate safe to forget the mother's mood and to be spontaneous, but any minute the * Preferences The comparison indicates the remarkable overlap between the experiences articulated and the areas of reality explored by the philosopher and the psychoanalyst. * Language Instead of cultural pursuits one observes in such persons extreme restlessness, an inability to concentrate, and a need to collect impingements from external reality so that the living-time of the individual can be filled by reactions to these impingements. Winnicott, D.W. (1958), Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis (New York:  Basic Books). * Conversation This interpretation of Winnicott’s use of the term inner psychic reality is supported by a poem entitled “Sleep” which he wrote near the end of his life (C. Winnicott 1978, p. 32): The poem’s metaphors indicate that Winnicott was aware of the depth as the source of the symbols that emerge in the psyche and of the necessity of diving into that depth in order to recover the luminosity of existence. I believe the term subjective has the same range of meaning for Winnicott as do the terms fantasy and illusion. The false self is constructed by way of “fantasying,” a disordered counterpart to healthy fantasy that “the individual creates to deal with external reality’s frustrations.” (Winnicott 1945, p. 153)  Fantasying involves “omnipotent manipulations of external reality . adaptation to her infant's needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less The symbol “does no more than collect together the details of the experience of aliveness” and at the beginning “means little more than the summation of sensori-motor aliveness.” (pp. In the passage quoted, Voegelin notes that Aristotle uses the same term, nous, for both the human capacity for knowing questioning and also for the ground of being itself that is experienced as the directing mover of the questions. and Other Late Unpublished Writings, 111-162. It includes the management of experiences that are inherent in existence, such as the completion (and therefore the non-completion) of processes … which from the outside may seem to be purely physiological but which belong to infant psychology and take place in a complex psychological field, determined by the awareness and empathy of the mother . This would fill him with annhilation anxiety and force him to withdraw his awareness from shared reality. . Even those who are in rebellion against the order of being will engage in what Voegelin calls the honest dishonesty of pretending that their contracted false self is real. . . . The result is a fantasy of a wholly immanent, contracted self that may relate to the world of existent things, but is unrelated to the ground of being and, therefore, cannot have contact with the true selves of others. That which gives direction to the desire and thus imparts content to it is the ground itself, insofar as it moves man by attraction (kinetai).”, “The tension toward the ground, of which man is conscious, thus must be understood as a unity that may be interpreted but not analyzed into parts. (1955), Homo Ludens:  A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston:  Beacon Press). By the term transitional objects Winnicott refers to the infant’s and child’s not-me possessions, such as a blanket or stuffed animal. * Propaganda He could not recognize his ignorance as such, were he not in the throes of a restless urge to escape from ignorance (pheugein ten agnoian) in order to seek knowledge (episteme). For Voegelin, the philosopher is critically aware of mythical symbols as the indispensible means for illuminating the order of his participation in reality, is open to the depth of the Cosmos from which symbols emerge in his psyche, and can engage freely in the play of symbols in partnership with all of reality, which Voegelin symbolizes as the Whole (Voegelin 1974). 149, 150-1)  Instinctual experience and the repeated quiet experiences of body care contribute to the gradual build-up of satisfactory personalization. The “transition” in these terms refers to the period in infancy from about two months, when the baby begins to engage in sensorimotor and preverbal play, to about seven months, when his subjective sense of self and other emerges and he begins to engage in symbolic play. Stern’s theory has the advantage of eliminating the problem of the infant transitioning from a state of unawareness to a state of awareness of relatedness to others. . the doing that arises out of being. . 72-73). 2.b) the role of the existential virtue of love in psychotherapy. * Interrogation * Meaning Winnicott, C. (1978), “D.W.W. For Voegelin play is an irreducible element of man’s participation in reality. This aspect of Winnicott’s work is the most important psychoanalytic theory of culture since Freud and has elicited the interest of scholars in disciplines such as literary criticism and theology. Beginning with the essays written in the 1960s that were published in Anamnesis (Voegelin 1978), Voegelin begins to speak of “noetic” and “pneumatic” experiences and to use those terms as synonymous to the philosophical and revelatory differentiations, respectively. handling and object-presenting. self disorders' in the child. [T]he imaginator will stay on the side of sanity in the psychiatric sense as long as he can sustain his play of honest dishonesty. The experience is of a cosmos in the sense that reality is experienced as an embracing oneness that comprises all that is. Why is this so? Laing (Laing 1965).