ABSTRACT
In this paper, Winnicott introduces us to the special psychological state that a pregnant mother enters prenatally, and sustains approximately for the first month postnatally. He studies this as both a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, and blends these two vantage points in this paper. Winnicott observes that it takes this state of “primary maternal preoccupation” to allow a mother to feel her way into the infant’s place and so to meet his/her needs. As those needs are met and an infant is allowed to be in his/her “going-on-being” place, the infant begins to stretch beyond bodily experiences, and to “imaginatively elaborate” those experiences, ever-so-gradually beginning to become a more integrated “I.” He is straightforward about what happens to those who do not experience this good-enough environment. They do not feel real to themselves. They instead feel a deep sense of futility. Throughout the paper, he uses the words “mother” and “maternal,” for which we might legitimately substitute the gender-neutral term, “primary caregiver.”
Winnicott, D. W. (1956). Primary maternal preoccupation. In Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis: Collected papers (pp. 300–305). Levittown, PA: Brunner/Mazel, 1992.
