ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the approach Anna Freud's and Donald Winnicott's views of infantile sexuality by considering their views of aggression as they articulated them just after the Second World War. Throughout the 1950s, both Winnicott and Anna Freud focused their attention on Freud's instinctual drive theory—particularly aggression—and introduced their different modifications. But in the 1960s, they both shifted framework and reconsidered the libidinal instinct again from within their new frameworks. Against Melanie Klein's emphasis on innate aggression, rooted in the death instinct, Winnicott considers aggression not as an instinctual drive in itself but as the key ingredient of an infant's line of development from absolute dependence on his mother's care to independence. Winnicott explored concepts of holding, handling, and object presenting, overlapping approximately with the anal stage. In the stage of holding, the empathy of the mother, her "alive adaptation" for her baby's needs and her primary maternal preoccupation are responses to the unintegrated state of the infant.