ABSTRACT
The importance of the impact of maternal holding on the emotional growth of the infant would be disputed by very few psychoanalysts. As is the case for almost all of D. W. Winnicott’s seminal contributions, the idea of holding is a deceptively simple one. The word “holding”, as used by Winnicott, is strongly evocative of images of a mother tenderly and firmly cradling her infant in her arms, and when he is in distress, tightly holding him against her chest. The mother’s emotional state entailed in her act of holding the infant in his earliest state of going on being is termed by Winnicott “primary maternal preoccupation”. As the infant grows, the function of holding changes from that of safeguarding the fabric of the infant’s going on being to the holding/sustaining over time of the infant’s more object-related ways of being alive.
