Donald Winnicott - The Concept of Holding

The Concept of Holding

'Donald Winnicott came to psychoanalysis from paediatrics, and...through his analysis with James Strachey', and his work with children and their mothers fed into the experience on which he built his most influential concepts, such as the "holding environment" so crucial to psychotherapy, and the "transitional object," known to every parent as the "security blanket."

'Winnicott's three volumes of collected papers (1958, 1965, 1971), replete with clinical experience and paradox, are an inexhaustible source of ideas for psychoanalysis'. His theoretical writings emphasized empathy, imagination, and, in the words of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has been a proponent of his work, "the highly particular transactions that constitute love between two imperfect people." A prime example of this is his concept of the "good-enough mother" - the 'ordinary devoted mother...an example of the way in which the foundations of health are laid down by the ordinary mother in her ordinary loving care of her own baby'.

Part of that loving care was the mother's attentive holding of her child; and 'as Winnicott (1965) suggested, the therapist recreates a "holding environment", that resembles that of the mother and infant'. Winnicott described minutely 'the business of picking a baby up...gathering her together', and the way that the 'mother's technique of holding, of bathing, of feeding, everything she did for the baby, added up to the child's first idea of the mother'. Winnicott considered that the 'child's ability to feel the body is the place where the psyche lives could not have been developed without a consistent technique of handling', and he extrapolated 'the idea of "holding" and of meeting dependence' from the mother to the family as a whole, and to the wider world surrounding it. He saw as a prerequisite for healthy development 'the continuation of reliable holding in terms of the ever-widening circle of family and school and social life'.

Out of his work developed the subsequent belief that 'one of the most deeply therapeutic factors in an analysis is the extent to which a sensitive analyst parallels...the earliest relationship between a responsive mother and her infant' - a symbolic parallel. 'Of this Winnicott wrote: "A correct and well-timed interpretation in an analytic treatment gives a sense of being held physically that is more real...than if a real holding or nursing had taken place. Understanding goes deeper'.