Winnicott’s Theory of the Maturational Processes

255 Pages·2016·1.27 MB·English

by  Elsa Oliveira Dias

WINNICOTT’S THEORY OF THE
MATURATIONAL PROCESSES

WINNICOTT’S THEORY OF THE
MATURATIONAL PROCESSES
Elsa Oliveira Dias
First published in 2016 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2016 by Elsa Oliveira Dias
The right of Elsa Oliveira Dias to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-364-3
Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
In memory of my mother
To my dearest children Sandra, Claudia, and Paulo Manoel, who made me a mother
each in their own way

“[…] We do need to try to get at a theory of normal growth so as to be able to understand illness
and the various immaturities, since we are now no longer contented unless we can cure and
prevent. We do not accept childhood schizophrenia any more than we accept poliomyelitis or
the condition of the spastic child. We try to prevent, and we hope to be able to lead the way to
cure wherever there is abnormality, which means suffering for someone”.
—Winnicott, 1965b, p. 67
“Leave man undisturbed from the cradle on! Do not drive him out of the tightly closed bud of
his being, out of the small hut of his childhood! Do not do too little, and thereby he shall not
dispense with you and thus distinguish you from himself; do not do too much, and thereby
he shall not feel your or his power and thus distinguish you from himself; in short, do not let
man know until late that there are men, that there is anything else outside of him, for only
thus shall he become a man. But man is a god as soon as he is a man. And when he is a god,
he is beautiful”.
—Hölderlin, Hyperion, p. 106

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
ABOUT THE AUTHOR xiii
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xv
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xix
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION xxi
INTRODUCTION xxiii
CHAPTER ONE
Winnicott and the debate with related areas 1
CHAPTER TWO
Basic concepts of the theory of maturational processes 27
CHAPTER THREE
The primitive stages: absolute dependence 69
CHAPTER FOUR
The stages of relative dependence and independence 115
ix