Wittgenstein and Freud

Philosophical Reflections on Psychoanalysis

The World is My World – Wittgenstein vs Winnicott

“The world as it presents itself is of no meaning to the newly developing human being unless it is created as well as discovered.”

Donald Winnicott

How should we think about our relationship with the external world and with other people? Since Descartes, philosophers have started with the experiencing subject and then run into difficulties. If we are essentially subjects who have experiences, how can we get beyond our experiences and have real contact with the external world and with other people?

Ludwig Wittgenstein wasn’t particularly interested in metaphysics, but his early work reflects traditional philosophical ideas about the individual’s relationship to the world. According to the Tratactus, the world is the totality of facts. It consists of things and their relationships. It has no inherent meaning. It is alien to the individual, who just has to accept its soulless reality. This is hard, indeed, unbearable. So, the individual seeks to take revenge on the world by asserting that their true self exists outside the world and that world only exists as their experience. The brutal otherness of the world (and their insignificance in relation to it) gives way to the comforting declaration that “the world is my world”. Unfortunately, this narcissistic conclusion has its drawbacks. It means that there can be no direct contact with external reality or with other people, and that there is nothing outside the indivdual that can enrich them.

As a psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott approaches this issue rather differently. Unlike philosophers, he does not take the existence of the experiencing subject (the self) for granted. On the contrary, he presents the development of a self as a challenging journey, and one that many people may need help later in life in order to complete. At the start, there is no subject, no baby – just a spark of life fused with and dependent on its mother. How the baby’s self develops depends on the the support that it receives from its mother. According to Winnicott, the developing human being faces two challenges. It needs to establish a relationship with its body (with its needs and desires), and it needs to establish a relationship with the external world. Winnicott argues that the baby can only meet these challenges if its mother indulges the baby’s omnipotence. When the baby experiences hunger, the mother needs to allow the baby to believe that it created the breast that satisfies its need. This approach enables the baby to relate positively to the need, since it is a need that the baby has the resources to satisfy. Its needs and its resources are matched, which means the baby can enjoy having and satisfying its needs.

Where the mother does not indulge the baby’s omnipotence, things go wrong. The baby experiences its needs as alien demands that it cannot satisfy and that it would rather not have. Each time the mother meets the baby’s need, the trauma is increased rather than eliminated, since the baby is confronted with its dependency. It needs the breast, but if the breast is perceived as something other, something entirely outside it, the baby will hate its need and hate the thing on which it depends. It is not a good breast. It is an uncaring, alien thing that the baby has to subordinate itself to in order to get what it needs. It may even appear as a malevolent thing that tantalises the baby and punishes it for having needs.

Of course, no one is suggesting that the baby really creates the breast. But, according to Winnicott, good-enough mothering involves allowing the baby’s this illusion and disillusioning it in doses it can cope with. This is a difficult process. The baby does not want to accept the existence of a world on which it is totally dependent. It denies that the breast is the mother’s insists that it created the breast. This attack on the mother’s love for her baby is painful, and she may retaliate and force the baby to recognise its dependence. This takes us back to the negative scenarios outlined earlier. Alternatively, the mother may comply with the baby’s assertions, in which case the baby will come to expect its omnipotence to be permanently accommodated. A third possibility is that the mother is destroyed by the baby’s attacks, in which case the baby will feel guilty, will fear the destructive power of its own impulses, and will be scared to interact with a world that is too fragile to cope with its demands. 

But the normal, positive scenario is that the mother survives the baby’s attacks without retaliating. In this way, the baby becomes able to recognise that, while it has needs and capabilities, there are other selves that also have needs and capabilities. Rather than being humiliated by its dependency, it discovers that its needs can open up a relationship with another person, who is experienced as good. The baby accepts that it is not self-sufficient, but it still feels that it is good to have needs. It is able to enter into a relationship with a world that has meaning for it, a world that meets its needs and, if not created by it, seems at least to some extent created for it. The baby can feel: the world is my world, it is a world I have a place in. Furthermore, the baby recognizes that it shares this world with other people and that the “not-me-ness” of the external world is an enrichment of its own world.

What should we make of Winnicott’s story? Well, it provides a framework for understanding people. We can use it to reflect on the way an individual is living their life and to seek to understand why they relate to themselves and to the world in the way they do. Do they relate to their desires as theirs or do they wish that some (or all of them) did not exist? Is their body something they enjoy or something they seek to ignore or wish they were not lumbered with? Do they relate to the world as containing good things and as a meaningful place where they can be creative and play? Or is it a hostile place they have to cope with or a dead place that has nothing to offer them (a totality of facts as it were)?

Does this mean Winnicott’s account is just a story, just a framework? Well, we understand the physical world in terms of the concept of gravity, so, is this just a framework, just a story? No, it is a framework that explains things – which is exactly what Winnicott’s account seeks to do. We may argue that it exaggerates the importance of the first six month of a human being’s life or challenge its strong emphasis on the mother/primary carer or dispute its claim that failure to indulge the baby’s omnipotence creates difficulties in how the individual relates to herself and to the world, but this just underlines the fact that Winnicott is making substantive claims. His account is not just an interesting way of looking at things. Rather it seeks to explain why people are the way they are. Evidence for and against his account can be put forward even if the validity (or non-validity) of its claims cannot be demonstrated as straightforwardly (or as conclusively) as claims in the natural sciences.

But isn’t there also a specifically Wittgensteinian challenge to this account? Winnicott attributes thoughts and feelings to infants who are nowhere near being able to talk and whose behaviour cannot demonstrate the complexities that would seem to be needed if we are to ascribe complex thoughts and feelings to them. What possible criteria could there be for saying that a baby believes (or does not believe) that it created the breast? Winnicott would certainly claim that there are things you can observe when a baby feeds that would support one conclusion rather than the other, but his claims do not rest exclusively on what can be observed in infancy. On the contrary, what the person the baby becomes later says and does, how they relate to the world, to other people and to their bodies will all reflect and therefore testify to how they experienced the first months of their lives. Winnicott is making claims about the first experiences of the baby, but the significance of those claims mean that the evidence for and against them can be drawn from any period of that person’s life. This type of link between a claim and the criteria for it is typical of psychological concepts. There are many criteria for the claim that X harboured a grudge against Y since their youth, but if X is good at hiding their feelings, the decisive evidence for the truth of this claim may only become apparent after a twenty-year period of apparently civilised interaction.

Another way of approaching this Wittgensteinian challenge is to note that Winnicott was led to his account by his experiences with patients in analysis. Patients talked about what they believed they felt when they were very young (and they had dreams that seem to reflect what they felt), but more importantly they related to him in ways that convinced him that this was how they related to their mother as a baby. This may seem speculative or far-fetched, but, as mentioned earlier, this evidence does not stand alone. It links up with the here and now. The point of Winnicott’s claims about the patient’s experiences as a baby is to cast light on the way they think, speak and act today outside the consulting room just as much as inside it. Furthermore, as a theory about how human beings develop, his account casts light on the thoughts, attitudes and behaviour of people who would never think of seeking psychoanalytic help. It certainly seems plausible to me that people’s relationship to the world outside them, to other people and to their own bodies is structured by the introduction to the world that their mother or primary care was able physically and psychologically to provide them with.

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bluejade1

I am a philosopher in search of wisdom and happiness and not always sure in which order I should search.

3 responses to “The World is My World – Wittgenstein vs Winnicott”

  1. Richard Gipps Avatar
    Richard Gipps

    Great to see your blog up and running Paul!

    I am not yet convinced that you’ve successfully defended DW against LW’s criteria challenge:

    DW claims that a) “the baby… believe[s] that it created the breast that satisfies its need”; b) the “baby will hate its need [for the breast] and hate the thing on which it depends”; c) Later, if all goes well, the baby ” the baby … recognise[s] that “it is good to have needs”, that “the world is… a world I have a place in”, that “it shares this world with other people”.

    The LWian question is: What are the criteria for the baby having a) that omnipotent delusion, b) hating its own needs, c) recognising that it is good to have needs, that it has a place in a shared world?

    Omnipotent delusions are, after all, attributed on the basis of discourse. And babies don’t go around saying ‘I believe I have created my mother’s breast’ etc. In fact, depending on one’s use of the term ‘baby’, babies don’t go around talking (by baby we either mean child 0-4years, or a mere infant i.e. 0-1 years) at all.

    In response to a LWian challenge you suggest:

    a) there may in fact be behavioural criteria for these beliefs/feelings/thoughts in the baby;
    b) how an older child / teenager / adult analysand talks about their experience gives us a basis for ascribing infantile b/f/t to them;
    c) hiding one’s feelings when young can mean that the criteria are unmet.

    In response to these I ask:

    a) I just can’t imagine what the behavioural criteria could be for a *baby* having an omnipotent delusion that it created a breast. If the baby wasn’t surprised when the breast appeared when he wasn’t hungry, would that defeat the ascription of the omnipotent delusion or not. Or, what are the behavioural criteria for hating one’s own needs. To hate one’s own needs is, cognitively speaking, a fairly complicated endeavour!
    b) I don’t really see how anything my adult patient could say would give me grounds for thinking that as a baby they thought they’d actually created the breast that feeds them. There’s also the fact that, if they did say something that made me think that, isn’t it likely that what I’d be looking at would be *evidence* for them having had that delusion, and not something criterial for that earlier delusion? I’d say that AT BEST we’re in a situation like that of PI§342 regarding William James’s Mr Ballard.
    c) Can a baby hide its feelings from itself? What degree of behavioural/verbal complexity is required before we can ascribe unconscious feelings to it? (cp: ‘We say a dog is afraid his master will beat him; but not, he is afraid his master will beat him tomorrow. Why not?’ PI§650) What comes to my Wittgensteinian mind here is David Finkelstein’s thought about why we don’t say of animals that their thoughts/feelings are properly described as either conscious or unconscious. The reason is (v briefly put) that it is only when someone’s reports of their feelings are not also expressive of those feelings that the uncs/cs distinction can so much as come into play. And so, when we don’t yet have the capacity to self-ascribe emotional experiences (‘I am sad’ etc.), do we really have uncs vs cs? (We do of course have thought that’s probably worth calling ‘primary process’ as opposed to ‘secondary process’, but if that’s ‘uncs’, it is so in a different sense.)

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  2. bluejade1 Avatar
    bluejade1

    Many thanks for your comments, Richard.

    I think Winnicott’s formulation is deliberately slightly provocative, although that gives it a richness which I also think is important. But perhaps the best way to explore your challenge is via a cruder version of what Winnicott is saying. Part of what he is talking about is the difficulty that human beings have in accepting their limitations/dependency. He suggests that people will enjoy a better relationship to the world, to their bodies and to others if they are not confronted with their dependency too early or too brutally. So, it is better if initially the “breast” is not experienced as something other, something the infant is dependent on (and can’t control, be sure of etc). Although I have not done much (or indeed any) real baby observation, I am sure it is possible to observe a whole range of differences between infants who find their feeding experiences relatively easy and those who do not. The former will be relatively relaxed during the process, perhaps playing with the breast, sucking a little and then coming back to it. In contrast, other babies might seem more anxious, unsure whether the breast is going to be there for them and give them what they want. They may then seize the breast suddenly, quickly get as much nourishment from it as they can and then push it anyway and ignore it. Obviously, my accounts have a fair amount of interpretation built into them, and you may still want to say: a one-month-old baby has not yet developed enough for it to make sense to speak of it as feeling anxious, but my argument would be that you can see even in very young babies types of behaviour that link up with and form the basis of the sophisticated psychological concepts we apply to them later in their lives.

    Maybe you will accept that, but point out that there is still a big gap between these points and the claim that the happy infant believes it created the breast or even the claim that it has no sense that the breast is not part of its own capabilities and resources. I think that is true and if we all had very similar relationships to the world, our bodies and other people, then we might be content with saying that some infants adapt easily to the process of being fed via the breast and others do not. But Winnicott claims that the infant’s early experiences structure those relationships. To put it very crudely, the infant who had no doubt the breast would be there for it and was able to relax and play with it will have a similarly positive relationship to the world, while the infant whose interaction with the breast had a different quality will have a less positive relationship to the world as an adult, e.g. they will experience anxiety about whether the world will provide for them, will grab what they need furtively and greedily and will not want to acknowledge what they get from the world. In seeking to defend Winnicott, I am conscious that I am making everything rather crude and simplistic, but what I am trying to show is that it is possible to make connections between conclusions one could draw from observing an infant and conclusions one might draw about how an adult relates to the world, their body and other people. It is these connections that justify using sophisticated concepts to describe the infant’s experience. Of course, if someone does not believe that the first months of life play a fundamental role in people’s lives, they will see these descriptions as far-fetched and misguided. Similarly, if they do not see the sort of distinctions that flow from Winnicott’s account as useful in thinking about how adults live their lives, then they will reject his descriptions. However, to revert to my crude very way of putting it, if you think that there is some truth in the idea that there are two types of people – those who were confronted too early or too brutally with their dependency and those who were not – then you may well be interested in Winnicott’s attempts to explain the behaviour and attitudes of adults in terms of what they experienced at the very start of their lives.

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    1. Richard Gipps Avatar
      Richard Gipps

      Hi Paul!

      That some babies are more anxious at the breast I’ve no doubt. That the relationship with the breast may colour our later relationship with other parts of the personal and even impersonal world seems very plausible to me. Reality contact depends preeminently upon frustration tolerance, as Freud (IIRC) discusses, and this will surely be to the fore in our relations with the breast and by extension, ultimately, the feeding parent. In fact, all your developmental claims in your response to my comment seem *very* plausible (and not at all as ‘crude’ as you suggest, by the way!). BUT I’m STILL left thinking this is all a very long way from ascribing to the baby the omnipotent delusion that it created the breast (or that a mere baby could hate its own need, or that a mere baby could recognise that it’s good to have needs). Winnicott’s way of formulating the matters is so psychologically interesting precisely because it makes this stronger – and, I suggest, prima facie ontologically implausible – claim. I don’t think it will do, to preserve what’s of most interest in his theory, to water it down to the more credible set of claims. What makes us sit up at it, as with many of Klein’s claims too, is precisely the way in which he seems to attribute what common sense suggests isn’t thus attributable – and not on psychological but on ontological grounds: the baby isn’t yet, we naturally think, the kind of being which could have thoughts such as those.

      Now it is of course possible to ascribe omnipotent delusions to adults! And for sure I’m happy for Kleinians et al to use the language of the breast to articulate all this metaphorically. (‘See how he puffs on that cigarette. He thinks he owns the breast’ etc) And whilst we should all be wary of thinking we can reconstruct much of the actual infantile life of the adult patient from how they relate to the analyst – we would at the very least first want to see actual predictions made during infant observations be confirmed by adult analyses of these infants however many decades later – it’s surely at least plausible that there’s a causal connection between the infantile and the adult attitude. (Though some other things, like attachment patterns, do change somewhat over the lifespan.) None of this, however, by itself justifies ascribing to the infant such properties of the adult attitude as can’t by other means be ascribed to the infant. An oak tree develops deformed leaves, or has difficulty standing straight, depending on – let’s imagine – the degree of acidity in the acorn. We wouldn’t say, after learning of this connection, that the acorn has deformed leaves or was not standing straight; it’s not the right kind of being to stand or to have leaves.

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