Winnicott's Paper: The capacity to be alone

 

Winnicott's Paper: The capacity to be alone

By/Dr. Hanan Hassan Mostafa 

“… As I mentioned at the beginning, this paper [Winnicott’s paper: The capacity to be alone] is not easy. The difficulty stems first from the fact that the paradoxes are unbearable in the mind unless we try to resolve them, but it doesn’t stop there. The difficulty deepens when Winnicott tries to justify both linear thinking and paradoxical thinking. I find it difficult to imagine that the “internal environment” could replace the presence of the “external object mother” in the child’s capacity to be alone. Whenever I try to paint this picture in my mind, I go back to Winnicott’s 1952 diagram, in which the child is depicted surrounded by the mother and her environment. But as I contemplate the diagram, my mind realizes that this is a completely straightforward and clear conception, free of the paradoxes that Winnicott is trying to highlight: the child, according to the diagram, appears to be directly connected to the mother, while in fact the paradoxical idea is that the child can be alone and at the same time feel the mother’s presence internally.

I don't have an answer to the question Winnicott poses: Will there ever come a time when the child alone is sufficient to fill the role of the mother's external entity, in that paradox in which the child is alone, yet with his mother? Perhaps the obstacle lies in the way we conceive of time. When Winnicott says, "As time goes on," he seems to be talking about a linear, sequential time, a time that flows like a river with a clear course, what Ogden called "diachronic time."

But what we may need is another time, a "synchronic time," where all time is lived in the present moment. The past has passed, whether seconds or years ago, but it does not disappear: the past lives on in the present, through the traces left on the human being by previous experiences, as Eliot said, "the present moment of the past." And as Faulkner wrote, "The past is not dead; it is not even past!"

If we look at time from this synchronistic perspective, the passage of time becomes more like the feeling of play and dreaming. We don't ask the child how long his dream was, or how many hours he played. From the perspective of synchronistic time, there is no need to say that the internal environment replaces the role of the mother's external entity. Rather, the child's experience with his mother can be understood as an effect that leaves its mark on him, a part of who he is and what he becomes, without speaking of an 'internal object'. There is no need to invoke the concepts of the internal and external worlds; rather, we can think of past and present experiences as part of the child's journey, in relation to who he is and what he will become. This way of thinking is more in tune with the trajectory of Winnicott's thinking in his later years. 

Thomas Ogden speaking about psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's 1958 paper "The Capacity to Be Alone"