Silence and Silencing in Psychoanalysis by Aleksandar Dimitrijević

Author:Aleksandar Dimitrijević
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000217612
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

The importance of silence for the individual patient

Relatively ignored by Freud in favour of the later stage of the Oedipus complex, the baby’s earliest developmental period journeys from late pregnancy, through the individual’s birth into what for Freud was ‘autoeroticism’ and ‘primary narcissism’ and then on to the establishment of a rudimentary boundary (the first recognition of the ‘me’/‘not me’ distinction) in the context of the first object choice within the environment of the nursing couple; the baby’s absolute and then relative dependence on the mother’s care. Freud’s relative inattention to this earliest developmental time is recognized by Goldman (1993) when he suggests that Winnicott made it his life’s work to elaborate what Freud put in a footnote.

Winnicott does indeed bring to life this important pre-Oedipal stage that is ‘preverbal, unverbalized and unverbalizable’ (1967, p. 112) and a silence interspersed with sounds; he emphasizes all that happens outside language and before words. Winnicott includes early behaviour and the rich variety in the quality of silences that occurs within the nursing couple. His oeuvre is a passionately observed exposition of the development of the unique human subject in the early environment of the ‘ordinary devoted’ mother and her habits of baby care. In parallel Winnicott explored the traces of this earliest time of life and its vagaries as they manifest between the analytic couple, the therapist and patient, in the clinical psychoanalytic encounter.

Although eventually a fully-fledged human being, what Winnicott saw as the newly born ‘bundle of anatomy and physiology’ can only be considered a psychical entity as an infant–mother unit and when one includes along with the baby, the care of the ‘ordinary devoted’ mother; Freud’s aforementioned footnote (Freud, 1911, p. 220). In detailing the prehistory and early history of the human being and in exploring its lessons for psychoanalytic technique, Winnicott believes that as a Freudian, he is simply taking up where Freud left off.

In his early days as a pediatrician, as shown in his first book Clinical Notes on Disorders of Childhood, Winnicott (1931) wished to inform his medical colleagues of how, by history-taking and observation of the child’s clinical presentation, one can differentially diagnose the emotional disorder which speaks silently through bodily symptoms from ordinary organic disease.

Winnicott shows that so much is happening between the baby and the mother at the beginning. The good enough mother by her perfect adaptation to the baby’s needs creates a situation for her baby, an illusion of unity, which allows the baby the experience of omnipotence and to simply ‘be’ in demand-free relaxed identification with their mother. From their own perspective, the absolutely but obliviously dependent baby ‘is’ the mother and the mother ‘is’ the baby. Through this reliable care experienced over time, the baby builds a confidence that what they need they will create/find (with creating and finding being paradoxically considered identical). In unconscious fantasy, the baby also ‘destroys’ the mother who repeatedly survives the greedy primitive loving of feeding.

Over time there is important growth which is met by a

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