The imaginative elaboration of body functioning and maternal holding: Winnicott and the formation of the psyche-soma

Abstract

Since the concept of imaginative elaboration of body functioning, which is essential to Winnicott's idea of psyche-soma, has rarely been investigated up to now, this article sets out to do this and tries to pursue the meaning and articulation of that concept in the corpus of Winnicott's theory. In this way, it contributes to bringing the body to the core of psychoanalytical theory.

Keywords:

• imaginative elaboration of body functioning
• psyche-soma
• mind

Acknowledgements

The first version of this paper was reviewed by psychoanalyst Janete Frochtengarten, whom I would like to thank for her contributions.

Notes

¹For Winnicott, unconscious fantasy appears only later, after the so-called use of an object stage (cf. Winnicott, 1992b). In addition, he thought that the concept of death instinct – or Thanatos, to give it its Greek name – was of no use, having developed a monistic conception of instincts (which considers the aggressive elements as part of the baby's primitive love impulse).

²Winnicott was unable to consider the constitution of sexuality as something so automatic and immediate because of his contact with borderline patients who, as adults, had a completely false “sexuality,” one that operated mechanically or served some most basic functions of subsistence, such as, for instance, the fear of disintegration.

³The uninterrupted nature of the flow of experience, sustained by maternal holding, is what allows that which Winnicott called the infant's going on being. When this experience is interrupted by a split false self – which isolates the true self from any contact and imitates surrounding human traits to adapt to environmental demands – the infant loses that continuity of going on being, thus simply subsisting in an “as if” way. It is the advent of psychoses.

⁴ Incorporation and evacuation, on the other hand, exist as processes from the very beginning.

⁵The unconscious that existed until then has a purely descriptive statute, that is, it constitutes mechanisms and processes that function at a threshold incapable of reaching the conscience, which, in the initial stages, is not even entirely constituted as such.

⁶In a different text, Winnicott describes a pathological form of the superego that seems to bear relations to this one: “in some cases there may have been a false superego development based in an abnormal way on the intrusion of a very powerful authoritarian influence derived from the environment of early years” (Winnicott, 1965, pp. 19–20, emphasis added). As however, he does not elaborate further on the subject, it is difficult to be more precise regarding his thinking in this regard. Personally, I see this kind of false superego as an extremely active part in certain formations of the split false self, common to borderline patients, which functions as a formation of intensely oppressive psychic forces. However, it could also perfectly well describe the superego of certain melancholic or grave obsessive neurotic patients.

⁷It is true that, for Winnicott, the mother performs an important mirror function – reflecting to the infant an image of itself. This, however, does not characterise a kind of reverie, as it does not imply a transformative digestion (of β elements into α ones, for example); the function of the maternal look is to grant existence to the infant at a period in which it lives dispersed rather than integrated.