ABSTRACT
This is a wide-ranging paper from Winnicott in which he covers many crucially important topics. His major focus is to examine the development of the ego—and the caregiving that supports its integration, personalization, and capacities for object relating. The newborn is part of an infant–mother couple. The “ego-coverage” given by the mother means that, because the infant cannot supply anything for himself, she is reading, anticipating, and responding to need before it registers as need and before it escalates into what would be overwhelming and psychologically annihilating for the infant. The mother is the “I” for the infant before the infant has an “I” from which to cover himself. Winnicott explicitly links compromises of very early infant care (in the first hours and days of life) to later-expressed serious pathologies of nervous system, attentional, and psychological processes.
