ABSTRACT

This chapter explores an idea of D. Winnicott’s that is of central importance for thinking about social processes and institutions. By impingement, Winnicott has in mind the demand for the infant to adapt to the needs of the mother who, rather than responding to the infant, expects that the infant will respond to her. Winnicott contrasts impingement with “active adaptation to the child’s needs,” which “enables him to be in undisturbed isolation.” The ideas of the mother-infant unit and the holding environment are important, then, not because of the way they establish the human individual as inevitably embedded in a world of relatedness, but because they are the necessary basis for the creation of an inner world that is separate from the world of object relations. The perpetuation of norms of being as the individual’s identity underlies the formation of a false self organized around the demands of adaptation.