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Abstract
The author offers a creative reading of Winnicott’s (Citation1967) “Mirror-role of mother and family in child development.” Winnicott presents the idea that a pivotal experience in the process of the infant’s coming into being as himself is the mother’s communicating to the infant, by the look in her eyes, what she sees there when she looks at him. In the absence of the experience of being seen, the infant’s capacity to feel real and alive atrophies. The author fleshes out Winnicott’s thinking by suggesting that just as the infant comes more fully into being as he sees himself in his mother’s eyes, so too, the mother comes more fully into being as a mother as she sees herself in the infant’s eyes. The paradigm shift that Winnicott has contributed to psychoanalysis is reflected in the clinical work he presents: (1) the goal of psychoanalysis is no longer the enrichment of the patient’s self-understanding; rather, the analytic goal is the patient’s coming more fully alive to himself; and (2) the analyst helps the patient achieve this end not by making astute interpretations but by allowing the patient to experience the pleasure of making discoveries of his or her own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Potentially personally identifying information presented in this article that relates directly or indirectly to an individual, or individuals, has been changed to disguise and safeguard the confidentiality, privacy and data protection rights of those concerned, in accordance with the journal’s anonymization policy https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/upaq20.
Notes
1 This discussion of “Mirror-role of mother and family in child development” is the fifteenth in a series of articles in which I offer “creative readings” of seminal analytic contributions. I have previously discussed works by Freud, Winnicott, Isaacs, Fairbairn, Bion, Loewald, and Searles (Ogden Citation2001, Citation2002, Citation2004, Citation2006, Citation2007a, Citation2007b, Citation2010, Citation2011, Citation2014, Citation2015, Citation2016, Citation2018, Citation2021, Citation2023).
2 Throughout this article, Winnicott quotes that do not cite the publication year are from: Winnicott, D. W. (1967). Mirror-role of mother and family in child development. In Playing and Reality. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1971, pp. 111-118.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Thomas H. Ogden
Thomas H. Ogden is a Supervising and Personal Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.