Donald W. Winnicott by Dethiville Laura;

Author:Dethiville, Laura;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Karnac Books

It is well known that babies have certain movements in the womb which at first are rather like the swimming movements of a fish. The very valuable activities of infants are well known to mothers who look for quickening at the sixth month; presumably sensations also start at some time or other; it is at any rate possible and indeed probable that there is a central organisation present which is ordinarily capable of noting these experiences. I wish to postulate a state of being which is in fact the ordinary baby before birth as well as afterwards. This state of being belongs to the infant and not to the observer. Continuity of being is health. If one takes the analogy of a bubble, one can say that if the pressure outside is adapted to the pressure inside, then the bubble has a continuity of existence and if it were a human baby this would be called “being”.

If on the other hand the pressure outside the bubble is greater or less than the pressure inside, then the bubble is engaged in a reaction to impingement. It changes in reaction to the environmental change, not from personal impulsive experience. In terms of the human animal this means that there is an interruption of being, and the place of being is taken by reaction to impingement. The impingement over, the reacting is no longer a fact, and there is a return to being. This seems to me to be a statement which not only can take us back to intra-uterine life without demanding a stretch of imagination but which can also be brought forward and applied usefully as an extreme simplification of very complex phenomena belonging to later life at any age. (Winnicott, 1988, p. 127)

Winnicott takes care here to clarify that he is anxious to “keep a rein on his imagination”; he takes the precautions necessary at that time, since with such ideas, he could of course have been taken for a crank. Now, more than thirty years later and thanks to technical progress (in particular the echography), we see that he was right, even if it is regrettable that this same technical progress has led to problems in excess, a “perpetual exploration”, practically “tracking” the foetus. For today, just as the baby is an object of observation the minute he comes into the world, so are the movements, reactions, and life of the foetus not entirely protected in his mother’s womb, but voluntarily revealed on a screen (“The echography kills the fantasy”, comments an echographologist specialised in pathological pregnancies, and Monique Bidlowski talks of “catastrophic echographies”).

The psychic adventure begins in the pre-natal period

However we regard this “visibility”, it does seem established today that the psychic adventure starts for the baby in the prenatal period. A great number of experiments have shown how the foetus reacts vigorously to any modification in his environment, and to the emotions felt by the mother, emotions that generate hormonal transformations that are transmitted through the placenta.

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