Sex and Sexuality

Winnicottian Perspectives

Lesley Caldwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429918933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"Winnicott" and "sex" are two subjects that are rarely associated with one another. Sexuality is not a prominent theme within the work of Winnicott, who preferred to concentrate on the development of the self from infancy. However, his writings contain unexplored insights into sexuality and it is these hidden insights that prompted the author to invite papers from leading analysts to expand upon them. This collection provides a fresh and innovative look at the work of Winnicott and into sexuality, in particular infantile sexuality. The unusual link of Winnicott to Freud and to a psychoanalysis located in the drives encourages a different perspective into British psychoanalysis. Other diverse themes include a historical examination of Winnicott through the British Society; an exploration of the similarities between Laplanche and Winnicott; the use of Winnicott's work in the treatment of sexual dysfunction; and the interrelation between sexuality and play. This is the sixth volume in the Winnicott Studies Monograph Series.

Chapter One
Introduction

Lesley Caldwell

Despite Winnicott’s statement in his posthumously published Human Nature (1988) that “Any theory that by passes the importance of instinct and the significance of childhood sexuality is unhelpful” (p. 36), the impact of sexual difference and its organization of human individuality, the place of the drives, and the dominance of sexuality so central to the Freudian schema are not usually understood as forming an integral part of Winnicott’s concerns.

His account of human development makes fundamental the environmental provision that originates in the actual relations between mother and baby and gives considerable weight to physiological changes as part of the conditions for the emergence of an incipient psychic structure. This privileges the body and its handling in the acquisition of all the capacities of being human and makes maternal care and the body fundamental to the development of mental functioning. Without losing sight of the more familiar preoccupations associated with Winnicott, the articles collected in this volume present an account that is attentive to sexuality—particularly infantile sexuality—and they explore a Winnicott unapologetically linked to Freud and to a psychoanalysis located in the drives. The volume offers a less familiar approach to Winnicott’s work, and in so doing it invites a different engagement with the traditional concerns of British psychoanalysis.

“In terms of baby and mother’s breast (I am not claiming that the breast is essential as a vehicle of mother-love) the baby has instinctual urges and predatory ideas. The mother has a breast and the power to produce milk, and the idea that she would like to be attacked by a hungry baby” (1945, p. 152). This matter-of-fact assertion of the essential ambivalence at the heart of the feeding relationship—of how, through the propping of the drive upon need, “infantile sexuality attaches itself to one of the vital somatic functions” (Freud, 1905d, p. 182)—describes the mother–child relationship in terms of reciprocal desire and the coexistence of aggression and sexuality for what Winnicott calls the “excited” infant. But his paper does not elaborate on the potential relationships for both participants assumed by such a description, nor does it develop, as did Ferenczi earlier and Laplanche later, the basis of the mother’s desire or the seduction signified by her availability. Instead, it uses the link between early life and later disturbance to think about the place of infantile fantasies and when and how they may be said to develop. There is a strongly contemporary feel both to this concern with the baby’s realizations about the world and about him/herself and to the different kinds of analyses demanded by different patients. Winnicott proposes that this demand originates in patients’ fantasies about two separate, but related things: about the analyst and what she or he is doing and why, and about the self and what happens inside it. Each involves sexuality and the links between psychic and physiological growth in acceding to the attributes of being human. Each calls up the necessity of the other in the establishment of human subjectivity and how this is to be thought about and engaged with in the arena delimited by psychoanalysis.

Winnicott’s interest in the emotional and psychological implications of the shift that occurs in babies around age 5 to 6 months leads him to infer that a fundamental human achievement—the localization of the self in a body—together with the growing recognition of existing in time and space, become established as the baby moves from being unintegrated to a state of integration through external, usually maternal, care and its psychic consequences.

Infantile sexuality is certainly significant, but only after this move from unintegration to integration has been effected and the baby comes to a realization of a world outside itself and the limits imposed by that world on the world of unlimited fantasy that preceded it. To ask when and how emotional responses register, and how such a registration is to be conceptualized, is to pursue a different set of questions from those of Freud or Klein. Indeed, what Winnicott stresses is not loss and depression in the face of progressive disillusion, but the advantages of a realization that what can be imagined has its limits. He proposes that what might be at stake in the idea that a baby’s need is met, and how the baby may register such a moment in fantasy, relates to the baby’s desire, but the desire has different components. While acknowledging the strength of a baby’s wishes, Winnicott sees the tasks confronting the infant in sustaining his or her instinctual experiences as secondary to negotiating the existence of a self that can take on that negotiation. This amounts to a divergence about the origins and the form of human individuality and difficulty, but, rather than being a rejection of the Freudian schema, it may be seen as a revision based upon the evidence of close continuing observation, combined with a willingness to speculate convincingly about what is observed. Both “Primitive Emotional Development” (1945) and “The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation” (1941) argue for an analytic and paediatric interest in the interrelation of body, mind, and psyche by hypothesizing about the probable psychological referents that accompany or produce minute shifts in physiological arousal in the infant. Winnicott’s extensive interest in the somatic indicators of psychic states, and his elaboration of how the infant becomes a human being, is an intensive study of the conditions without which the drives can never be accommodated sufficiently for the subject to begin to live a normal life (with all of the abnormal, psychoanalytically speaking, which that entails).

What mainly followed from these concerns was a form of theorizing predominantly interested in the implication for later health of early infantile states. These interests place Winnicott, and the originality of his attempts to describe the formation of the self, in a solidly English tradition of psychoanalytic work and thought. At the same time, his way of writing is an intensely idiosyncratic challenge to some of its more pragmatic priorities. Eric Rayner’s (1991) account of the Independent group identifies the appeal of a particular way of going about things for the group of whom Winnicott was a leading member, an appeal that formed part of a more general English approach where the impact of internal configurations on early development and a comprehensive turn to object relations displaced Freud’s account of sexuality and the drives as the basis of human subjectivity. Susan Budd (2001) has provided a useful historical account of British psychoanalysis and its involvement in that specific tendency of “Englishness” which is discomforted by intellectuals and by intellectual activity. How those cultural roots helped shape the actual interests and working methods that came to distinguish British psychoanalysis is of interest not only for Winnicott but for the other distinguished clinicians of the British school. What emerges of his choices in the consulting-room, particularly with adult patients, choices certainly shared by most of his colleagues in the postwar period, seems to propose something else: a sexuality that is both there and not there, assumed and demonstrated, displaced and concealed.

This can be seen in the account of some of the work from a long analysis with a female patient reported in the late paper, “Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living” (1971a). There he discusses the differences between dreaming and fantasying in terms of the former’s creative associations with living, and the latter’s representation of a state of non-living, a pursuit of mental stasis, of non-activity, which he describes as “dissociated”. He reports two dreams brought by the patient that deal with the theme of having and producing a child. The dreams in themselves reveal how far a part of the patient has moved from fantasying to the living and engaged activity that is dreaming, and Winnicott summarizes for himself, for the patient, and for the reader what the distinction between them entails. He does not emphasize what could be thought of as the libidinally invested aspects of this fantasying, this activity aimed at non-activity, this “fantasying” as it appears in the therapeutic relationship in the session. The patient’s instinctual urges themselves appear to be left “formless,” in the sense that they are not given form verbally in Winnicott’s interpretations. This absence is particularly marked because of the manifest content of the dreams, and the associations that are reported as emerging in the analytic work. The patient’s belief that she has a girl child of about 10 is recognized and made explicit; the existence of a man who is the child’s father appears, and so does her mother, who is seen as depriving her of children. The patient is able to say, “The funny thing is that here I look as if I am wanting a child, whereas in my conscious thought I know that I only think of children as needing protection from being born” (pp. 30–31).

In the next session the patient begins by returning to what the analyst had said about fantasying as interfering with dreaming: “I woke at midnight and there I was hectically cutting out, planning, working on the pattern for a dress. I was all but doing it and was het up. Is that dreaming or fantasying? I became aware of what it was all about but I was awake” (p. 32). There is the immediate challenge this woman is making to her analyst and his accounts are reported without comment, but Winnicott describes how they continue to talk around the subject with a striking use of words: “working herself up in this way restricts her from action”. The patient responds by describing how she listens to talks on the radio while playing patience. Winnicott interprets again and then provides an example of her doing a similar thing “at that moment” (my italics) in the session: “while I was talking she was fiddling with the zip of her bag: why was it this end? how awkward it was to do up! She could feel that this dissociated activity was more important to her sitting there than listening to what I was saying” (p. 32).

In the exchange that follows, the patient describes going off yet again, and the Winnicott reports: “here again . . . she felt dissociated as if she could not be in her skin” (p. 32). Although he goes on to talk of her bodily involvement as producing great tension and a lack of psychosomatic climax, as it is recorded here he does not connect this or the symptomatic act with the zip to any sexualized dimension. The resonance with Dora (Freud, 1905d) and her reticule seems to emphasize the possible sexual associations. Freud links Dora’s vaginal discharge with her mother and her unconscious wish to be like her mother—that is, to have also been infected by her father’s venereal disease. So he proposes that Dora’s masturbation has a part in her neurosis, and she flatly denies it. But, a few days later, she is wearing a little reticule, “and as she lay on the couch she kept playing with it—opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again and so on”. Freud robustly goes on to give Dora a lesson in symptomatic acts, a more outspoken version of Winnicott’s explanations of fantasying and dreaming to his patient, whose attempt to make what her analyst says foolish and contemptuous—“So that’s what you think” (p. 32)— also contains echoes of Dora.

The wish for a frozen moment would seem to be directed at subverting the unconscious transference implications contained in the diachronic dimension of the session, and Winnicott adds that the patient recognizes the paralysis of action that is the aim of this fantasying. My interest here is in his decision not to take up the possible transference aspects of how his patient’s recourse to an essentially substitutive activity (taken to a level he describes as “dissociated”) may enact what could be at stake in an absence of sexual activity and its implications. Something seems to be left out, and that something is, or could be, the transference dimensions of sexuality and its organization of the patient’s material. This is not to maintain that what is taken up and reported is any less appropriate or less “correct” than an interpretation that confronted the transference currency of sexual fantasy. Rather, it is to suggest that choices about the level at which to interpret, about oedipality, and about sexuality and aggression relate not only to the patient but also to the analyst’s personality and to the culture of which that analyst is a part. Any extended account of this fascinating area would need to address how theoretical commitments and preferences, or adhesion to particular psychoanalytic schools and preferred ways of working, are necessarily linked with psychic structure and psychic choices. (Roustang, 1982; Spurling, 2002).

One of Winnicott’s starting points is the link between the physical body and the infant’s instinctual impulses, the interrelation of psyche and soma from the beginning; however, in some of the work with adults the sexuality of the patient, of the analyst, and of the analytic relationship seems to disappear. For the contributors in this volume, sexuality is central, and what is interesting about Winnicott’s ideas is their contribution to this orientation. This is different from Rayner’s celebration of English pragmatism and empiricism, and, apart from Freud, the theorists most consistently mentioned are Ferenczi and Laplanche—analysts intensely concerned with the implications of adult sexuality for the sexuality of the child, committed to the further elaboration of the emphases of the early Freud, and, until recently, very often ignored by British clinicians.

André Green reads Winnicott historically through the British Psychoanalytical Society and the profound effect upon it of Melanie Klein and her reorganization of Freud. He sees this as part of the more general fate of the Freudian legacy and the challenge it posed to contemporary thought and society, then and now. In a lecture at the Squiggle Foundation in 1991 (Abram, 2000), Green had discussed the distinctions between psyche, soul, mind, and intellect in Winnicott’s work, and he here returns to them to argue that Winnicott’s emphasis on emotional development went beyond that common in the British Society, to take “the form of a sort of incarnation, the result of the dwelling of the psyche in the body, where the psyche is an intermediate structure between the organism and the environment”. He proposes to extend the work on the transitional to intermediate structures within the internal world and, potentially, to the essential structure of the ego itself. And he insists that the location of the object outside omnipotent control, which is fundamental to the establishment of the self, cannot be accomplished without destructiveness.

Beginning from his own disagreements with Laplanche’s criticism of Winnicott‘s idea of the first “not-me” possession, Dominique Scarfone is interested in drawing out the similarities between two writers he admires. In discussing the actual meaning of “the object” and of what is implied by “use” in “The Use of an Object” (1971h), he too insists on the place of destructiveness in the constitution of the self. At the stage of object-relating, the object is not an object because there is no differentiation and “an indistinctness” reigns “between the experience (emotion) and the object”. Nonetheless, the infant in the unintegrated state is subjected to the impact of otherness through the care of the adult, and in Laplanche’s account this implies a “generalized seduction” through which psychic sexuality is implanted in the child’s psychological structure. Scarfone focuses on the time horizon involved in the existence of a self-reflexive “I” and the impossibility of introjection and projection from the start. He ascribes two different meanings to “projection” in Winnicott’s paper, the one at the stage of object-relating to be understood to “imply that knowledge of the object amounts to the emotional experience implied in relating and that “one could argue that the reality of the object is the emotional experience occurring within the subject–object compound. That is, the experience embedded in the relating does not require the subject to be clearly differentiated from the object.” The word “projection” at this stage is used in the sense of a denial of any sense of separateness. At a later stage, projection proper—aimed at abolishing separateness—is retrospectively introduced as a template for the earlier phenomenon. Laplanche’s emphasis on seduction and its transformation into a general framework for structuring the psyche and the analytic situation are seen as supplementing and complementing Winnicott.

Andreas Giannakoulas traces the shifts in meanings and understandings of the primal scene within Freud’s own development and then in later writers, attributing to Winnicott a new “fertile perspective” where “the instincts serve the self, they do not constitute it”. In emphasizing the fundamental impact of the parents’ own unconscious world, he, like Scarfone, as well as Mario Bertolini and Francesca Neri, links Winnicott with Ferenczi and Laplanche in the importance attributed to the parents’ unconscious messages and the child’s attempts to make sense of them. Giannakoulas quotes a passage from The Piggle which, he suggests, is the frankest statement of sex in accounts of child analysis. The importance of transgenerational transmission, the mother’s pathology, and the impact of the parental unconscious for the possibilities open to the infant is raised here, as it is by most of the contributors. All of this argues for a Winnicott for whom sex and sexuality are fundamental.

Joyce McDougall’s paper takes Freud’s psychosexual stages and the creative potential of sublimatory activities to discuss the need to create, and the profound factors inhibiting creativity. She links a Winnicottian sense of the place of creativity in all human activity to sexuality, especially pregenital sexuality, and stresses the sexually infused dimensions of any creative endeavour. She, too, recuperates violence and aggression for the project of becoming human.

Helen Taylor Robinson reads Winnicott‘s paper on transitional objects and transitional phenomena in parallel with a reading of John Donne’s “The Good-Morrow”. She argues that art enlarges the domain of what psychoanalysis can usefully discuss, and she uses this to establish a set of links between adult sexual exchange and its utilization of and development from infantile pleasures. An interest in the overlap between adult love and infantile regression is shared with Giannakoulas, and she too touches upon the availability in the unconscious of the earliest sensations and of the conditions within which they may be risked in adult sexual pleasure.

Mario Bertolini and Francesca Neri begin their paper with a moving reading of Rilke’s poem, Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes and the potential conflicts with which the Orpheus of the poem could have been torn. They use this to draw out a dimension of the poem which, for them, reflects Rilke’s approach to “feeling real”. In exploring this terrain they link Rilke with Winnicott in their case study of a late adolescent who initially comes to analysis because of his sense of not feeling real. Despite the existence of much clinical material concerned with his need for sex, feeling or not feeling real remains the major issue. Bertolini and Neri discuss this in terms of the adolescent’s split between sex and sexuality and the processes required for them to be brought together.

In her account of two women patients referred to a national health clinic, Maggie Schaedel discusses how the origins of sexual dysfunction are to be found in failures within the early mother–child relation and an incapacity to play. In her exposition of these cases, Schaedel describes some of the difficult countertransferential issues that frequently arise in such clinical situations, and she describes her extensive use of Winnicott’s work as a resource. Her chapter also demonstrates the connections between severe underlying pathology and its manifestation in sexual symptomatology.

In “Talking Nonsense, and Knowing When to Stop”, first given as the Madeline Davis memorial lecture in 2003, Adam Phillips ranges across a series of interrelated issues to wonder about those situations where talking of ending does or does not make sense, and he insists on the impossibility of thinking endings and psychoanalysis together. This leads him to wonder about what does happen when an analysis stops, especially since the project of psychoanalysis incorporates the timelessness of the unconscious and the acknowledgement of loss. Phillips asks what may be implied in thinking about psychoanalysis as free association, and free association as the talking of nonsense. In his account, the person able to speak nonsense and be listened to is the person of interest to Winnicott, but speaking nonsense is harder to put together with desire. Phillips notes that Winnicott refers only rarely to free association, but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• CONTRIBUTORS
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO Winnicott at the start of the third millennium
• CHAPTER THREE Laplanche and Winnicott meet ... and survive
• CHAPTER FOUR Childhood sexual theories and childhood sexuality: the primal scene and parental sexuality
• CHAPTER FIVE Violence and creativity
• CHAPTER SIX Adult eros in D. W. Winnicott
• CHAPTER SEVEN Sex as a defence against sexuality
• CHAPTER EIGHT Working with women in an NHS outpatient clinic for sexual dysfunction
• CHAPTER NINE Talking nonsense, and knowing when to stop
• REFERENCES
• INDEX