Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971) came to psychoanalysis from paediatrics. His theory bears the mark of decades spent observing mothers and babies at Paddington Green Children's Hospital. Where Freud began with the drives and Klein with the infant's inner fantasies, Winnicott began with the relationship between a baby and the person who looks after it. He liked to recall his remark at a scientific meeting that "there is no such thing as a baby". Wherever there is an infant, there is someone caring for it, and the two cannot be understood apart.
For Winnicott, therefore, love is less a feeling that one person has and more a capacity that grows within an environment, which can support or distort it. This article is part of the Psychoanalysis of Love series. It explains his main ideas and what they mean for adult love, couples and therapy.
Who was Winnicott?
Winnicott trained in the British Psychoanalytical Society and was supervised by Melanie Klein, whose influence on his early work is clear. During the Controversial Discussions of the 1940s, he became a leading figure of the Middle Group, later known as the Independent Group.
He shared Klein's interest in early infancy and in how love and hate coexist (see Melanie Klein on Love). However, he believed her theory gave too little weight to what the real mother does and to the baby's dependence on her. Like Fairbairn, he placed relationships, rather than the release of instinctual tension, at the centre of development. He never built a complete theoretical system; his ideas appeared in short, often paradoxical papers, many collected in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958), The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965) and Playing and Reality (1971).
Good-enough care: where love begins
In a 1956 paper, Winnicott described primary maternal preoccupation. This is a heightened sensitivity that develops in the mother towards the end of pregnancy and lasts some weeks after birth. She identifies closely with her baby and senses what it needs. This allows the infant's earliest sense of simply existing, its "going-on-being", to become established.
Holding means physically holding the baby, but also all the ways in which the environment protects the infant from experiences it cannot yet manage. In "The theory of the parent-infant relationship" (1960), he described holding as what lets the baby's inborn potential unfold.
When holding fails, the infant suffers impingements. These intrusions interrupt its sense of continuity, so that it must react to them rather than grow through them. The most extreme he called "unthinkable anxieties", such as falling for ever or going to pieces.
Winnicott used the phrase good-enough mother in his 1953 paper on transitional objects. At first, she adapts almost completely to the baby's needs. Then, as the baby can tolerate it, she adapts less and less. These gradual failures are a necessary part of care: perfect adaptation would leave the baby no reason to discover a world beyond its own wishes. "Mother" in Winnicott's writing describes a function, and later writers generally apply it to any primary caregiver.
The capacity to love grows out of reliable care. Trust, in Winnicott's sense, is not a belief that others will be perfect. It is an inner experience that failures can be survived and repaired. In a couple, this is the difference between expecting a partner never to let us down and knowing that a sharp word can be talked about and put right.
Illusion, disappointment and the space in between
At the very beginning, the mother's close adaptation gives the baby an illusion: that it has created what it needs. The breast appears just when the baby is ready to imagine it. Winnicott considered this early feeling of being all-powerful (omnipotence) essential. Only a baby who has had enough illusion can bear the gradual disillusionment in which it discovers that the world does not simply obey it.
Between these states lies a third area of experience. In "Transitional objects and transitional phenomena" (1953), Winnicott wrote about the blanket or soft toy to which a baby becomes attached, calling it "the first 'not-me' possession". This transitional object is neither wholly inside the child's mind nor wholly part of the outside world. He insisted this paradox be respected rather than resolved: no one asks the baby whether it found the object or created it. This intermediate area continues into adult life as the space of play, art, religion and culture.
Romantic love belongs partly to this area. The beloved is a real, separate person, yet is also experienced through the lover's hopes and wishes. From Winnicott's point of view, this overlap is not simply a distortion:
- a love with no illusion at all would lack life and energy
- a love that allowed no reality would be pure fantasy
What matters is whether the illusion can fade gradually and bearably, or whether its loss feels catastrophic. Discovering that a new partner is more anxious than they seemed, for example, can become part of knowing them better, or can feel like the end of everything.
This theme links Winnicott to Lacan's account of love, although Lacan viewed love's imaginary side with far more suspicion. His paper on the "mirror-role of mother and family" (1967) explicitly started from Lacan's mirror stage, proposing that what the baby first sees in the mother's face is itself.
Being alone together
In "The capacity to be alone" (1958), Winnicott argued that being able to be alone without anxiety is a sign of emotional maturity. It rests on a paradox: it develops through the experience of "being alone in the presence of someone". A baby who can rest while a reliable caregiver is present but undemanding gradually takes that presence inside. Later it can be alone because, inwardly, it is never entirely alone.
For adult love, this clarifies the difference between intimacy and fusion (merging into one another). A relationship in which neither partner can bear the other's absence, silence or separate interests may feel intense, but it rests on anxiety rather than security. Winnicott's implicit ideal is two people who can be quietly together, for instance reading in the same room, each with their own thoughts, without either feeling abandoned.
The true self and the false self in love
In "Ego distortion in terms of true and false self" (1960), Winnicott linked early care to authenticity. When the mother meets the baby's spontaneous gestures, the true self, the source of spontaneity and of feeling real, can come alive. When she repeatedly replaces the baby's gesture with her own, the baby learns to comply and develops a false self: a well-adapted surface, organised around what others expect, which protects a hidden true self.
Winnicott described a range, from the healthy social adaptation everyone needs to defences so complete that the person feels empty behind a successful exterior. In love, a false self often shows up as compliance. A person may be attentive and devoted, yet feel that what their partner loves is a performance. Such relationships can be stable for years before the difficulty surfaces as:
- a growing sense of futility
- a loss of desire
- a sudden departure that bewilders a partner who saw no sign of discontent
The pattern overlaps with what is popularly called people pleasing, although Winnicott traced its roots back to the earliest relationship.
From ruthless love to concern
Winnicott's view of early love was not sentimental. In "Primitive emotional development" (1945), he suggested that the baby's earliest love is ruthless. The baby uses the mother without regard for the effect on her, not from cruelty but because it does not yet recognise her as someone who can be hurt. The mother's task is to tolerate this ruthless love.
In "The development of the capacity for concern" (1963), he described how this changes: the baby realises that the mother it attacks in moments of excitement is the same mother who cares for it in quiet moments. The anxiety this brings can turn into concern, a sense of responsibility for one's own impulses, provided the mother stays present and accepts the baby's gestures of giving and making amends (reparation). Here Winnicott reworked Klein's depressive position in more developmental and environmental terms: concern depends on a relationship in which repair is possible and is received.
Mature adult love does not exclude appetite, aggression or the wish to possess. It includes them, together with care about how they affect the other person. A love purified of all ruthlessness may be safe, but it is likely to be lifeless.
Why love needs to survive anger
Winnicott's most original contribution to the theory of love is probably "The use of an object" (1969). It was first presented to the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1968 and revised for Playing and Reality. In psychoanalysis, "object" simply means the person we love. Winnicott distinguished two ways of relating:
- Relating to an object: the other person is experienced mostly as a bundle of our own projections, as if under our control.
- Using an object: the other person is recognised as real, separate and outside our control.
The move from one to the other depends on destruction and survival. In fantasy, we destroy the other person. If they survive, they are placed outside the area of our imagined control and become real. Winnicott summed up the sequence in a famous series of statements: "Hullo object!" "I destroyed you." "I love you." To survive means that the other person neither collapses nor retaliates.
For couples, a partner becomes fully real, and so lovable as a separate person, by being tested and surviving. When conditions are good enough, conflict is one of the ways love becomes realistic. If one partner meets the other's anger by withdrawing completely or retaliating, the angry partner may conclude that their aggression is dangerous, or that the other is unreliable. If the partner stays present and undamaged, both can discover that the relationship is stronger than the attack.
Jessica Benjamin built her theory of mutual recognition directly on this paper, arguing that survival must eventually work both ways (see Jessica Benjamin on Love).
Hate as part of love
In "Hate in the counter-transference" (1949), Winnicott discussed counter-transference, the therapist's own feelings towards a patient. He made the then unusual claim that analysts inevitably come to hate as well as love some patients, and that this hate should be recognised rather than denied.
He extended the point to parenthood, listing reasons why an ordinary, loving mother also hates her baby, and argued that a child needs a parent who can tolerate hating it without acting on that hate. Love that cannot admit any hatred tends to rely on idealisation and denial; for Winnicott, honestly acknowledging hate is part of what makes reliable love possible.
Why Winnicott's ideas matter in therapy
Winnicott's concepts are now part of the everyday vocabulary of psychodynamic practice.
- The setting as holding. Regular sessions, a reliable therapist and clear boundaries act as a form of holding, which allows difficult experiences to emerge (see the therapeutic relationship).
- Regression to dependence. For some patients, especially those with a strong false self, Winnicott believed therapy must allow a period of dependence before real change is possible.
- Survival of the therapist. Patients may test the therapist with anger, criticism or threats to end treatment; the therapist's ability to survive this without retaliating or collapsing is itself therapeutic.
- Play. In Playing and Reality, Winnicott described psychotherapy as taking place where two areas of playing overlap, the patient's and the therapist's.
In couple therapy, these ideas raise questions such as whether each partner can be alone in the presence of the other, whether the relationship can survive aggression, and whether either partner loves through a false self. Psychoanalytic couple therapists have also applied holding to the relationship itself, as an environment that can contain, or fail to contain, both partners' anxieties.
Winnicott's ideas can help people recognise patterns such as:
- feeling unable to bear a partner's absence, silence or separate interests
- being devoted to a partner while feeling that one's real self is hidden
- avoiding all conflict for fear that anger will destroy the relationship
- expecting a partner to be perfect, and feeling devastated when they are not
- finding it hard to admit negative feelings towards someone one loves
Criticisms and limitations
Winnicott's ideas have been criticised on several points:
- Mothers and fathers. Feminist writers note that his focus on maternal adaptation can encourage mother-blaming and neglects the social conditions of mothering or the role of fathers.
- Precision. His writing is evocative but often imprecise, and its paradoxes make many claims hard to test, though infant research and attachment theory have offered broadly similar findings (see Bowlby and Attachment).
- Sexuality. Some analysts, notably André Green, argued that the object relations tradition neglected sexuality. Winnicott wrote little about adult erotic love, and a model of mother and baby cannot simply be transferred to relationships between adult equals.
- The infant's inner world. Kleinian critics felt his focus on environmental failure underestimated the infant's own fantasies and aggression.
Conclusion
Winnicott presents love as a developmental achievement rather than a given. It becomes possible when early care provides enough holding to build trust, enough illusion to make the world meaningful, and enough bearable disappointment to make it real. It deepens when a person can be alone in the presence of another, give freely rather than out of compliance, feel concern for the effects of their own impulses, and discover that the other person survives their destructiveness. Many difficulties in adult relationships are, in this light, developmental tasks still in progress. When such difficulties persist and cause distress, psychodynamic psychotherapy can help to explore them; online sessions can be arranged here.
References
- Abram, J. (2007). The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott's Use of Words (2nd ed.). Karnac.
- Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Pantheon Books.
- Greenberg, J. R., & Mitchell, S. A. (1983). Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Harvard University Press.
- Phillips, A. (1988). Winnicott. Fontana.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1945). Primitive emotional development. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26, 137–143.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Hate in the counter-transference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30, 69–74.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 89–97.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1956). Primary maternal preoccupation. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958). Tavistock.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 585–595.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Hogarth Press. (Includes "Ego distortion in terms of true and false self", 1960, and "The development of the capacity for concern", 1963.)
- Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 711–716.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock.