ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the concepts attaching to the third stage: when the person goes towards independence. It also looks at the expansion and further internalisation of transitional space in the developmental situation, noting the changes in the baby and in the mother’s role at this time. The chapter shows how D. W. Winnicott’s consideration of the mother function is useful clinically in two ways. First, it helps us deal with those patients for whom the difficulty is of a preoedipal nature. Second, it allows our practice to be more flexible and to account for the complexity of human experience, by recognising the dialectical nature of the transference and real relationships. Through psychoanalytic thinking, Winnicott made explicit and conscious S. Freud’s unconscious deference to the importance of the mother function in the analytic space, so that its curative property might be harnessed. Winnicott’s model of the analytic situation accounts for all aspects of the complicated mother-daughter relationship.
