Wittgenstein and Freud

Most psychoanalysts attribute a great deal of importance to people’s early experiences, but the stories they tell seem far removed from what we would normally say about the experiences of babies and very young children. The school of psychoanalysis that does this in the most striking (and sometimes most offensive) way is Kleinianism, so it may be easier to explore this issue in relation to Winnicott, who was very influenced by Klein but who did not embrace complex Kleinian theories about internal objects nor favour the concrete sexual interpretations Melanie Klein used in her work with relatively young children. Nonetheless, Winnicott, like Klein, based his understanding of human beings on claims about our early experiences, and many of those claims (such as the claim that babies must be allowed to believe that they created the breast that feeds them) would strike many people as crazy. So, why does he make these claims? 

I see our dependency as a fundamental to Winnicott’s approach. We are dependent on other people (and on the world) throughout our lives, but this dependency is extreme as babies when we lack even the basic capabilities necessary to sustain our lives. Winnicott sees this situation as potentially highly traumatic, and he claims that to develop a positive relationship to other people and to the world we need to be shielded from too harsh or too early an exposure to this reality. The baby needs (for a while) to be sustained in the illusion that it is able to meet its needs out of its own resources. Or more poetically, it needs to believe it creates the breast that it feeds from. According to Winnicott, destroying this illusion too quickly or too abruptly will have a traumatic experience on the baby’s development, leading to a lack of belief in its own (creative) abilities and a hesitant, wary relationship to the world and to other people. The positive and negative versions of his story are not about a single, unique experience (at 08.00 baby X believed for five minutes that it created the breast; at 08.30 baby Y’s belief in its omnipotence was brutally destroyed). Rather he is talking about the cumulative impact of multiple experiences leaving the baby either with a traumatic sense of dependency or with a positive sense that it can manage its situation with its own resources.

The emphasis this sort of account places on early experiences contrasts with the once widely held view that what we experience as babies and young children has no lasting emotional impact and is quickly forgotten. Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex suggested that the experiences of early childhood have a massive impact on our adult lives, and, post-Freud, there has been a tendency to push the point at which course-of-life influencing experiences can occur ever earlier – to the point of birth or perhaps even earlier. I think this tendency is very understandable. In response to it, the philosophical question “at what point do we become capable of having experiences?” is not a clear question nor a very helpful one. It makes more sense to look at how neonates and very young babies behave and see if we can connect differences in their behaviour with things that have happened to them. If we can, then surely we would want to link this to how they experienced what happened to them, what it meant to them? Of course, we may not want to explain all differences in how babies behave in terms of things that have happened to them, preferring to treat some differences as the result of “natural endowment” or some as not yet fully-identified aspect of their genes or whatever. Overall, however, it seems to me that there is plenty of evidence that what can happen to us at the start of our lives can impact our development and therefore that there are early (potentially pre-verbal) experiences that we are going to want to try to understand (i.e. put into words) in order to make sense of how the individual developed from that point in their life.  

One of the reasons psychoanalysts (and others) see early experiences as highly impactful is that babies have very limited resources to cope with any difficult experiences they may have. If we as adults are anxious, we can think about our situation and assess how likely the negative outcome really is. We can talk to other people and see whether they think our anxiety is justified. We can also think about our past experiences, maybe remembering a time when our anxieties turned out to be unjustified or when the bad event did occur, but we nonetheless got by. Babies lack any of these resources, and it would seem plausible to suggest that if they experience anxiety or other negative emotions, they are likely to find these experiences harder to cope with. Unless we think these negative experiences are forgotten as the baby gets older or they are somehow not registered as experiences until the baby reaches a certain age, it seems to me plausible to claim that some of these early experiences may be traumatic and impact how the baby develops.

So far, perhaps, so commonsensical. But why does Winnicott ruin everything by claiming that the baby believes (and must be allowed to believe) that it created the breast? If he had simply said that parenting that constantly reminds the baby of its dependency will impact the baby’s development, who would have disagreed with him? Isn’t the problem that he takes an easy-to-understand claim and turns it into an elaborate story about complex experiences the baby is supposed to have? I think his richer story has two advantages. Firstly, it underlines the subtle aspects of the emotional interaction between mother and child. It is not just a matter of the mother being a good provider of food and warmth etc. It’s about her sensitivity to the baby and her ability to tolerate its unjustified and in a sense excessive demands. His formulation gives a sense of the difficulty of the mother’s task. It is not easy for a hard-pressed mother to allow her baby to believe that it created the breast that she is offering it! Secondly, compared with more bland formulations, Winnicott’s formulation provides lots of interesting avenues to explore in terms of the potential impact on the baby. His story highlights the difficulty we face in building a positive relationship to the world, given the fact that the world has absolutely no need for us whatsoever. It also highlights the doubts we may have about our own resources and about our own creativity. These points only give a crude sense of how Winnicott uses his story to try to understand what the early experiences of his child and adult patients were and where these experiences have taken them, but it is the rich, poetic nature of his formulation that gives him the resources to try to understand the specific individual he is trying to connect with. The baby does not have the conscious (positive) thought: “I created the breast” or the (negative) thought: “I am dependent on a breast outside my control”, but these formulations are attempts to cast light on how and why the baby’s early experiences affected it in the way they did. They are attempts to make sense of what happened to the baby.