Donald Woods Winnicott

A man who knew the real value of mothers

Donald Woods Winnicott (1896 – 1971) was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who worked with children and their families. He was particularly interested in children who were troubled or not well adjusted enough to live in their own society and the origins of maladjustment.

His seminal work was to develop the paradigm of the mother/child couple and his theoretical constructs embodied by his statement that, “There is no such thing as a baby”, along with “a baby alone doesn’t exist.” What exists is always a baby plus someone who takes care of him/her. For him that “someone” was usually referred to as a “mother”, rather than a “parent”, which reflected the era he lived in, but as I have argued previously, this is what all mammal babies are born expecting to find. As Grantly Dick-Read famously said:

This is a truth that those attempting to erase women and mothers want to deny, but babies do not read philosophy and do not care about adult opinions. They are primed to survive and in the natural world, this means they need their mothers to care for them. In all other mammalian species, losing your mother before you can care for yourself means that you die; humans are one of the few exceptions to this and until relatively recently this was true for us too.

Considering the vulnerability of human babies who lose their mothers, it is only modern technology and development of infant formula which allows babies to survive without receiving the nutrition provided by mother’s milk, and indeed only doctors, antibiotics and good medical care which allows babies who don’t receive the immunological components of breast milk to survive the infections that all newborns are exposed to. Even with the introduction of Foundling Hospitals to care for abandoned babies, extremely high mortality rates (up to 90%) were common. And a mother’s love cannot be replaced by simple custodial care, as was amply demonstrated by the fate of babies living in Romanian orphanages.

Winnicott’s work confirmed that the mother/baby dyad is the foundational relationship of our lives for all human beings and that this relationship (or lack of it) would echo through the remainder of our lives; that this formed the basis of our relationships with both others and with ourselves.

Our concept of “self” is fundamental to our psychological well-being and impacts every area of our lives and relationships. Winnicott posited that when we are born, we do not have a clearly defined or developed sense of self, but as we grow, we search for this through our interactions with others and by being in touch with our own bodies as they change. Through a mother’s repeated caring for her baby’s body (feeding, changing, cuddling, etc.) a mother is introducing and reintroducing a baby’s body to him or herself and integrating the growing body to the growing psyche of her child.

An authentic sense of self is pivotal to achieve a fully lived life

So how does a baby learn about the world and start to develop that sense of self? Is the world a safe place where someone will always have your back? Or is it filled with dangers and unreliable others who don’t care about you? Clearly, from a baby’s point of view, all this depends on their mother.

A child's first idea of the mother emerges from the care she gives to her baby. How she holds, feeds, bathes and cares for her baby creates the concept of ‘other’, compared with ‘self’ in the mind of her baby. Being secure in the experience of bodily safety within the mother/baby dyad allows this to be extrapolated into the wider world of ever widening family members to school and a social life that eventually, will not include a mother. It is from this secure base of continuous maternal care that the social expansion necessary for well-being can happen. This is attachment theory in action.

Winnicott thought that the development of an authentic self began in infancy, in the relationship between the baby and his/her mother. So how do mothers foster this in their babies?

By doing what most mothers are seen to do: talking to their babies, responding in a welcoming and reassuring way to the baby's spontaneous feelings, expressions, and initiatives. Through this, babies learn that their feelings are not problematic or dangerous, which means they don’t have to avoid their feelings. Babies who are listened to by their mothers learn that they are real people and their actions and feelings have meaning. A mother accepting their baby’s true self is the first step to development of an individual sense of self.

Please note that mothers and others do relate to babies differently depending on the perceived sex of the baby. Many experiments have been done that demonstrate that adults (whether or not they are parents) will sex stereotype babies based on what they are told about them or how they are dressed and impose on babies their own ideas of masculinity or femininity.

Babies whose needs are responded to and met allow them to feel confident, calm and curious. From a well-cared for baby’s perspective, they have nearly supernatural powers as feelings of hunger resolve in being magically fed, which means they can work on skills, rather than survival.

Mothers who are unable to respond adequately to their babies due to their own personal circumstances or situations, have babies who will certainly adjust, but not in a manner that optimises their overall well-being. “Good babies” who appear to be not asking for much, may just be so stressed that they have given up on getting the maternal care they need.

Winnicott believed that poorly attached babies developed a kind of “false” self (as opposed to an authentic self) as a defense against an environment that felt unsafe or overwhelming because of a lack of reasonably attuned mothering. This gave rise to his ideas around the “good enough” mother, who protected her baby from experiencing overwhelming extremes of discomfort and distress, emotional or physical. Winnicott recognised that no one could be a “perfect” mother and that babies were not expecting this either.

But babies who lack an involved mother do their best to defend themselves against the challenges and hazards they face. One of their strategies Winnicott labelled as “compliance”, which he defined as a behaviour motivated by a desire to please others rather than spontaneously expressing one's own feelings and ideas. If crying didn’t work to gain the attention the baby needed, they might try being a “good” baby and not asking for anything in the hopes that this would elicit the attention and care that all babies need. This can be seen in sleep training programs; babies learn not so much to sleep on their own, but that their mothers are not safe and reliable in meeting their needs so there is no point in asking for help.

By prioritising a false self over a true self, children learn to constantly anticipate the demands of others and comply with them over ensuring that their own needs are met. This is also a way of protecting a true self from an unsafe world. But basing your personality on the moods and needs of others, other than on your own feelings, thoughts, and initiatives, leads to feeling empty and phoney, which even later successes and social gains cannot compensate for adequately.

Winnicott was also interested in the role of play in humans and believed that play is essential for all of us to be truly creative. He wrote extensively about the use of a transitional object to foster a child’s healthy development. A transitional object is something like a teddy bear, that is both real and made-up at the same time. Playing with transitional objects can serve as bridges between the child's imagination and the real world outside the child and can help them learn to bring their genuine selves to relationships. Bill Watterson created a popular cartoon strip that showed this in action. Calvin is a small boy who loves his striped tiger Hobbes, but Hobbes is only ‘alive’ when he is with Calvin; any adults in the frame immediately render him back to his stuffed animal state.

During the first three years of life, the most important psychological task we have is to develop an increasingly separate sense of self in relation to a larger world of other people. A healthy child learns to bring their real self into relationships with other people, but a child with a false sense of self has learned that this is impossible or unsafe so hides their true self from others and instead pretends to be what is wanted because they believe that their true self is unacceptable.

What would Winnicott think of today’s Brave New World?

Personally, I think he would be truly appalled and consider much of what passes for mainstream acceptability as child abuse at worst and severely misguided at best. Two areas in particular would concern him I believe.

The first is the creation of “trans kids” and the second is the commodification of human babies.

“Trans kids” are an adult fantasy, not a material reality

So called “trans kids” are the ultimate example of a social construction. To believe that anyone can be “born in the wrong body” is an extreme example of delusional thinking. So called transgender children are solely the creation of adults.

Children are not born with any concept of either gender or sex. Adults mould children into the gender that their sex dictates, which varies according to the society and era they are born into. Children who are gender non-conforming have usually faced a variety of outcomes. Sometimes they are tolerated and acknowledged as ‘different’, sometimes they are driven out and must eventually leave to find another place to live their lives and sometimes they outwardly seem to be conforming but can lead very unhappy lives. A recent example of this would be all the gay men in the 1950s and 60s who married women, fathered children with their wives and held down jobs to support their families. Getting caught in the public toilets with another man and being charged with a crime often led to societal disgrace and ruin and or suicide.

Now a boy who appears effeminate will, in many Western cultural settings, be told that he must really be a girl. Some of this stems from parental homophobia (Suzie Green, until recently the CEO of the UK charity Mermaids explicitly stated this was her motivation for having her 16-year-old son castrated).

And is it any wonder that in today’s highly sexualised society that girls are choosing to opt out of womanhood altogether? Or that girls who don’t act feminine ‘enough’ are told this means they are really boys?

Looked at through the lens of Winnicott’s work, the damage being done to immature brains is obvious. Since changing one’s sex is impossible, any parent who affirms a sex that their child is not, is neglecting a child’s true self, while valorising a false self. How can a child have faith in a parent who only supports an imaginary state?

By letting a child take the lead in something where they are depending on adults to keep them safe, children are subjected to pressure and harm that they are not yet equipped to deal with. Previously respected institutions are claiming that even fetuses can be transgender.

The reason there are legal age limits for activities that adults engage in is that it is recognised that children lack the maturity to cope or will be harmed by participating. Alcohol can damage the adult brain, but its effects on a developing brain are catastrophic, so alcohol consumption is limited to those over a certain age. Driving a car requires complex decision making, so even if a child is big enough to reach the pedals and see through the windscreen, until they reach the legal driving age, this is prohibited. Statutory rape laws exist to protect underage girls from predatory men; girls cannot legally give consent to sexual intercourse until they reach an age threshold.

No child can give informed consent to their own mutilation. Children do not have adult experience, nor can they conceive of a future self because this sort of thinking takes place in our brain’s frontal lobe, which is the very last segment of brain to mature. Depending on sex and birth order, this may be as late as 25 (or more) years. Considering abstract concepts such as future fertility and sexual pleasure cannot be calculated by an immature brain.

(It is completely hypocritical to be in favour of so called “gender affirming treatment” for children while at the same time condemning other harmful practices such as female genital mutilation, circumcision and foot binding.)

Children who are affirmed in the wrong sex and go down the medicalisation path may never have fully mature brains because the major work of frontal lobe development is accomplished as a result of going through puberty. Puberty blockers are well named: they prevent puberty from occurring; they are NOT a ‘pause button’ as some claim them to be. Millions of years of mammalian evolution has programmed how we develop from the moment of conception to the last breath we take. Puberty cannot be “paused” without consequences, and all of these can cause lifelong harm.

Praising and celebrating a child’s false self, locks them into a position that can make it impossible for them to reverse course. It’s putting children into a roller coaster they can’t escape from.

Want a baby? No problem as long as you have a big bank balance

Thanks to the many marvels of science anyone can be a parent now. You don’t have to have any baby making ‘equipment’ or a parenting partner; the only criteria is the size of your bank balance. It’s like slavery, but without the ick factor of dealing with real people because babies aren’t considered to be fully fledged humans with their own human rights and agency, but are an item on a bucket list or something an adult wants to have.

Winnicott knew that mothers are essential for normal development and the deliberate creation of motherless babies would have been an anathema to him. When mothers die, it’s considered a tragedy, especially for their babies, but babies taken from the women who birthed them and given to biological strangers (from the baby’s perspective) are celebrated. How can this contradiction be justified?

This is a transaction, like buying food at the supermarket. If you got home and found the bag of apples was spoiling, you would return them and get a refund. Some “commissioning parents” are doing the same thing, but with real live babies. Surrogacy is not straightforward and even the ‘best’ agreements can go wrong.

Surrogate pregnancies are harmful to women, both physically and psychologically. Surrogacy increases the health risks for both women and the babies they carry, above the normal complications of pregnancy. Considering that most surrogates are already mothers to their own children, if a surrogate mother dies there is no monetary compensation that is going to bring her back.

Profiteering from surrogacy are the usual ‘follow the money’ suspects: big pharma, insurance companies, medical practices and corporate interests. Those carrying babies are the usual exploited group: poor women, and poor women in less wealthy countries where this is not a banned practice.

How can a baby who may have been created by the efforts of as many as six adults (egg donor, sperm donor, two commissioning parents and the “gestational carrier” and her partner) ever find their true self?

What happens if you have bought a baby through surrogacy, have used genetic engineering to create your “perfect” baby and the child is a "dud" or is somehow disappointing to you? Or you have sporting ambitions for your kid so you use the best genes you can find, but they prefer playing chess or reading books? What must it do to a child to know that their parents think they wasted their money on their very existence? That they can never measure up? Thwarted parental ambitions landing on children is bad enough with 'regular' kids, but when you don't get what you paid for.… the weight on a child must be unbearable.

What it means to be human is summed up by Winnicott as, “It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found”. We all value privacy and need time to think our own thoughts. But to not to have a mother who knows and understands us, who does not “find” our real self is a disaster indeed. For in our mother finding us, we are able to find ourselves.