ABSTRACT
The employment of a fiction like this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant — provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother — does almost realize a psychical system of this kind. Associated with the attainment of ‘unit status’, providing development is normal, the infant will gradually conquer and preserve ‘the capacity for re-experiencing unintegrated states, but these depends on the continuation of reliable maternal care or on the build-up in the infant of memories of maternal care beginning gradually to be perceived as such.’ Donald Woods Winnicott shows that the psychical unity of the development of the infant is established in various ways. The mother who has constantly held the situation ‘enables the infant’s coexisting love and hate to become sorted out and interrelated and gradually brought under control from within in a way that is’.
