ABSTRACT
The actual mother’s emotional capacity to manage the care of her infant from the beginning was captured by Winnicott’s term “holding”, which evolved from his work with evacuees during WW2. Adequate or inadequate maternal holding would come to light in the transference of the analytic situation. Maternal failure causes trauma – a rupture in the continuity-of-being – that culminates in a persisting crisis about a sense of feeling real and the ability “to be”.
