The Family and Individual Development by Winnicott D. W

Author:Winnicott, D. W. [Winnicott, D. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-135-07077-9
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

1960]

11

THE FAMILY AND EMOTIONAL MATURITY

The psychology with which I am concerned takes maturity to be synonymous with health. The child of ten who is healthy is mature for the child of ten; the healthy three-year-old is mature for the child of three; the adolescent is a mature adolescent and is not prematurely adult. The adult who is healthy is mature as an adult, and by this we mean that he or she has passed through all the immature stages, all the stages of maturity at the younger ages. The healthy adult has all the immaturities to fall back upon either for fun or in time of need, or in secret auto-erotic experience or in dreaming. To do justice to this concept of ‘maturity at age’ one would need to re-state the whole theory of emotional development, but I assume in my readers some knowledge of dynamic psychology and of the theory by which the psycho-analyst works.

Given this concept of maturity, then, my subject is the role of the family in the establishment of individual health. And this prompts the following question for consideration: can the individual achieve emotional maturity except in the setting of the family?

There are two ways of approaching the subject of individual development if we divide dynamic psychology into two parts. First there is the development of the instinctual life, the pregenital instinctual functions and fantasies building up into full sexuality, this being reached, as is well known, before the beginning of the latency period. Along this line of thought we arrive at the idea of adolescence at a time at which the puberty changes dominate the scene, and the defences against anxiety that were organized in the first years reappear or tend to reappear in the growing individual. All this is very familiar ground. By contrast, I want to take the other way of looking at things whereby each individual starts with almost absolute dependence, reaches to the lesser degrees of dependence, and so begins to achieve autonomy.

It may be profitable to think in this second way rather than in the first way. If we do so we need not be too much concerned with the age of a child or adolescent or adult. What we are concerned with is the environmental provision which is well adapted to the needs of the individual at any one particular moment. In other words, this is the same subject as that of maternal care, which changes according to the age of the infant, and which meets the early dependence of the infant and also the infant’s reaching out towards independence. This second way of looking at life may be particularly suited to the study of healthy development, and our aim at the present moment is to study health.

Maternal care becomes parental care, the two parents together taking responsibility for their infant, and for the relationship between their infants and their children. Moreover, the parents are there to receive the ‘contributing in’ which comes from the healthy children in the family.

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