ABSTRACT
The “stage of concern” is approached as the infant begins to feel concern for his mother, towards whom his ruthless love has been hitherto directed. The overlapping features of D. W. Winnicott’s stage of concern are ambivalence, the benign circle, contributing-in, and innate morality. The use of the word “depressive” thus poses a puzzle—one that Winnicott wishes to explore in terms of the infant’s ruthless love for his mother, which within a facilitating environment will change to ruth and concern. The depressive position, then, is a complex matter, an inherent element in a non-controversial phenomenon, that of the emergence of every human individual from pre-ruth to ruth or concern. The word “concern” is used to cover in a positive way a phenomenon that is covered in a negative way by the word "guilt". Concern implies further integration, and relates in a positive way to the individual’s sense of responsibility, in respect of relationships into which the instinctual drives have entered.
