. – Contact . Books | Voegelin, E. (1990a), The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. There could be no ignorant anxiety, from which rises the question about the ground, if the anxiety itself were not already man’s knowledge of his existence from a ground of being that is not man himself. The paper is very close to being a philosophical meditation on the reality of mutual divine and human participation in the In-Between. Concetti chiave della teoria di Winnicott ... IL CONTENIMENTO (HOLDING) E LA MANIPOLAZIONE (HANDLING) Una delle più importanti funzioni di una madre buona è quella di favorire, dunque, il processo di integrazione dell’Io del bambino, attraverso la sua identificazione con esso (relazione egoica) e il contenimento (holding). If we drop the assumption of initial unawareness of separateness, a second problem remains:  how do we know that the infant’s experience is like ours? Voegelin defines philosophy as “the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order,” and says that the proper object of philosophical inquiry is the logos or order of being. 148-9). Holding allows the infant to integrate his experiences. This interpretation of Aristotle indicates Voegelin’s view that man’s participation in being is not random or diffuse but is structured from within as a movement or tension toward divine Being. * Habit As long as those forces emerge in some form in play, the higher sectors of the personality will have some contact with the truth of the Cosmos. Voegelin, E. (1948), “Review of Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens:  Versuch zu einer Bestimmung des Spielelements in der Kultur. Winnicott, D.W. (1953), “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis, 229-242; expanded version in Playing and Reality, 1-25. * Trust . Tracing the exegesis backward, we therefore must say:  Without the kinesis of being attracted by the ground, there would be no desire for it; without the desire, no questioning in confusion; without questioning in confusion, no awareness of ignorance. Winnicott uses the symbols true self-false self in a way that is close to Voegelin’s. As this example suggests, play emerges from being, and an invitation to play from a trusted other can reverse what Voegelin calls “the fall from being” and what Winnicott calls “annihilation.”  The mother’s invitation to play enables the boy to recover the cosmic primary experience, and then the play itself elaborates the meaning of that experience and strengthens it. Winnicott no sense of self emerges except on the basis of this relating in the sense of BEING . This included views The infant has “hope” about his state of extreme dependence (p. 30). and the individual knows that it must never be communicated with or influenced by external reality . Holding “includes especially the physical holding of the infant, which is a form of loving.” (Winnicott 1960b, p. 49). development. Holding “includes the whole routine of care throughout the day and night, and … is not the same with any two infants.”  It “meets the infant’s physiological needs” and protects him from “physiological insult,” “takes account of the infant’s skin sensitivity,” “is reliable … in a way that implies the mother’s empathy,” and “follows the minute day-to-day changes belonging to the infant’s growth and development, both physical and psychological”  (pp. Specifically, the previous sections suggest three general types, and several subtypes, to include in such a taxonomy: 1)   The mature person who lives in the tension toward the ground of being, in playful openness to the depths of his psyche and the symbols that arise from it, on the basis of the existential virtues. With respect to the first problem, recent research by developmental psychologists suggests that the infant has some awareness of self and other from the beginning of life. The transitional object and the transitional phenomena start each human being off with what will always be important for them, i.e. The abstract terms “immanent” and “transcendent” and human and divine “poles” articulate in more differentiated form the truth compactly expressed in the mythical symbolism of mortal men and the immortal gods. He sees the micro-interactions between the mother and child as central to the (1955), Homo Ludens:  A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston:  Beacon Press). The mother gives the baby a brief period in which omnipotence is a matter of experience. call a true self hidden, protected by a false self. letting go comes in small and digestible steps, in which a * Objection handling ', Immediately beyond this in the direction of pathology is . The mother may thus hold the child, handle it and present objects to it, whether it is herself, her breast or a separate object. The mother can be viewed as a 'container' for the infant's bad objects, as 100, 103). Relations with the world are conducted by what Laing calls “the false-self system.”  The schizoid condition is accompanied by a feeling of being unreal and the absence of intimate relationships. Voegelin’s historical studies led him to conclude that, in societies such as ancient Egypt, where the breakthrough to the more differentiated language of philosophy or revelation has not yet occurred, mythical symbolism is the sole means of illuminating man’s participation in reality. 4, Winter, 349-362. The false self is constructed by way of “fantasying,” a disordered counterpart to healthy fantasy that “the individual creates to deal with external reality’s frustrations.” (Winnicott 1945, p. 153)  Fantasying involves “omnipotent manipulations of external reality . In Voegelin’s words: “It is an independent factor, a form arising from the animal level of being which is fit to become a carrier of cultural worlds of meaning; by virtue of its transcendence beyond existential necessity it links the spirit with animal nature without determining it pragmatically.” (Voegelin 1948, p. 185), Voegelin sounds the theme of man as a player, as homo ludens, at the very beginning of the first volume of Order and History. Since the primary experience of the cosmos is present in everyone’s consciousness if they can apperceive it, any human being can be creative: “Creativity is . These anxieties are aspects of the most primitive human anxiety of “annihilation” (Winnicott 1960, p. 47). Laing calls the experiential source of this condition “ontological insecurity” and argues that schizophrenia is an extreme version of the schizoid condition. Winnicott could “find no clear sequence in development that can be used to determine the order of description.” (Winnicott, 1971a, p. 99). Rather, it is the whole, to pan, of an earth below and a heaven above-of celestial bodies and their movements; of seasonal changes; of fertility rhythms in plant and animal life; of human life, death, and birth; and above all, as Thales still knew, it is a cosmos full of gods.” (Voegelin 1974, p. 68). | * Brand management 257-9). (Winnicott, 1967). adaptation failures and develops a pattern corresponding to the pattern of Voegelin argues that this person need not be a philosopher but must possess common sense (Voegelin 1978). Sense of self and other are no longer only core entities of physical presence, action, affect, and continuity. He worked nearly all his professional life as a pediatrician, treated upwards of 20,000 children, and is regarded as among the most gifted child psychotherapists. * Decisions Culture Education Philosophy Politics Voegelin, Biography Collected Works Excerpts Voegelin Audio Voegelin Videos Resources, About VoegelinView Announcements Archive Forthcoming Submissions Staff Donate, Following the Gaze: Beatrice’s Eyes and Beauty in The Divine Comedy, More or Less: Utopia as a Meditation on Human Nature, Marx’ World View – Conjectures and Aberrations. In the first of the two essays, Voegelin argues that Hegel is a representative modern thinker in that his existence is characterized by the coexistence of two selves. . child into the social world. Initially the baby’s life consists of unconnected and disorganized states. In the ordinary course of development, this tendency is supported by the mother’s holding and by “acute instinctual experiences” such as feeding that “tend to gather the personality together from within.”  With adequate support from these two sources, “[t]here are long stretches of time in a normal infant’s life in which a baby does not mind whether he is many bits or one whole being, or whether he lives in his mother’s face or in his own body, provided that from time to time he comes together and feels something.”  Winnicott goes on to say that, “[i]n regard to environment, bits of nursing technique and faces seen and sounds heard and smells smelt are only gradually pieced together into one being to be called mother.” (Winnicott 1945, p. 150). Winnicott contrasts the potential space of play with both “inner or personal psychic reality” and “the actual world in which the individual lives” (p. 103). Winnicott argues that the good-enough mother’s holding, handling, and object presenting together enable the infant to develop the capacity to interact with the mother and others as separate, whole persons. The restless search (zetesis) for the ground of all being is divided into two components:  the desire or grasping (oregesthai) for the goal and the knowledge (noein). The pairs of symbols “true self-false self” and “first reality-second reality” are equivalent to the Platonic pairs “philosopher-philodoxer” and “episteme-doxa.”  Voegelin refers to the task of the philosopher as gaining “the stature of his true self as a man under God.” (Voegelin 1969, p. 216)  The true self exists in open participation in the first reality of the tension toward the divine ground. This false self is no doubt development of the internal world. Voegelin, E. (1974), Order and History, vol. Voegelin, E. (1969), “The Eclipse of Reality,” in What is History? The experience is of a cosmos in the sense that reality is experienced as an embracing oneness that comprises all that is. against that which is unthinkable, the exploitation of the True Self, which would result in its annihilation.” (Winnicott 1960, pp. For example, Frederickson (1991) illustrates how recovery from delusional psychosis begins when the client starts to play with symbols playfully offered by the therapist as potentially useful for articulating experiences that have heretofore been too overwhelming for the client to symbolize. Handling 3. Einführung Konzepte von Winnicott, intermediärer Raum, Kommunikation, Autonomieentwicklung und potential space anhand eines kurzen Beispiels und von 4 Thesen • 2. He has presented papers at several meetings of the Eric Voegelin Society. For Winnicott psychotherapy is a form of mutual play that occurs in the potential space between the therapist and the client. ‘The whole realm of the spiritual (daimonion) is halfway indeed between (metaxy) god and man . Winnicott, D.W. (1971b), Playing and Reality (London:  Tavistock Publications Ltd). The myth told by Diatoma and reported by Socrates articulates the erotic tension in the soul of the philosopher, his longing for truth that is both an awareness of ignorance and poverty and an anticipation of fullness and knowledge. Stern’s theory has the advantage of eliminating the problem of the infant transitioning from a state of unawareness to a state of awareness of relatedness to others. part. In such societies, reality is symbolized as an embracing whole that is comprised of the four areas of the gods, man, the world, and society, all of which are symbolized compactly in terms of analogies with each other. By moving away from The myth reflects Plato’s insight into “the nature of the myth … as the upwelling, from the unconscious, of psychic forces which blossom out into assuaging expression,” and that “the myth remains the legitimate expression of the fundamental movements of the soul.” (Voegelin 1957b, p. 186)  In the following passage Voegelin comments on the freedom of the play of mythical symbols that was achieved by Plato and that, he argues, must be achieved by anyone who seeks to understand mythical symbols and use them to illuminate our participation in reality. * Body language Aristotle speaks of the concrete experiences of being ignorant; questioning in confusion, doubt, and perplexity; wondering; desiring; searching; grasping; and being attracted. [E]ach individual is an isolate, permanently noncommunicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.” This part of the person communicates with what Winnicott calls “subjective” objects or phenomena. Analysis | * Identity The comparison indicates the remarkable overlap between the experiences articulated and the areas of reality explored by the philosopher and the psychoanalyst. * Interrogation . * Tipping * Change Management Sitemap | The False Self has one positive and very important function:  to hide the True Self, which it does by compliance with environmental demands . In the passage quoted, Voegelin notes that Aristotle uses the same term, nous, for both the human capacity for knowing questioning and also for the ground of being itself that is experienced as the directing mover of the questions. Holding, handling, and object presenting each support the infant’s development of a distinct psychological capacity that Winnicott believes to be fundamental to healthy living. According to Voegelin, Plato’s myth of the myth in the Timaeus represents the maximal expression of this freedom. According to Voegelin, Heraclitus uses the symbols of pistis (faith) and elpis (hope) to articulate the sense of direction that makes possible the psyche’s progress toward the “invisible harmony,” which is “better [or: greater, more powerful] than the visible.”  “Through lack of faith (apistie) the divine [?] Voegelin, E. (1971), “On Hegel:  A Study in Sorcery,” in Published Essays 1966-1985, 213-255. Winnicott, D.W. (1952b), “Psychoses and Child Care,” in Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis, 219-228. Winnicott, D.W. (1965), The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (Madison, CT:  International Universities Press). . Philosophizing involves a meditative descent into the depths of the psyche in search of the experiences that motivated such symbols and a meditative ascent from the depths in search of a more differentiated language with which to interpret those experiences and symbols and, thereby, bring the order of being to essential clarity. Winnicott's development stages, Winnicott foi supervisando de Melanie Klein (1882-1960)– psicanalista austríaca responsável por pioneiras teorias e descobertas acerca do aparelho psíquico do bebê e da criança – sendo que a teoria kleiniana serviu tanto para Winnicott confirmar algumas de suas investigações, como para o guiar e inspirar sua em própria teoria e abordagem, distinta da clínica de Klein. The Existential Virtues and the Depth of the Psyche. Winnicott identifie trois fonctions maternelles, indispensables pour le développement harmonieux de l'enfant : - l'object-presenting (la présentation de l'objet) : la mère, en étant là, présente au bon moment, permet à l'enfant de lui attribuer une existence réelle mais aussi d'éprouver l'illusion qu'il crée l'objet. Awards | These formulations are consistent with the psychotheraeutic literature that has been influenced by Winnicott. . We soon feel lonely if we are isolated escapes being known.” (B 86). Voegelin takes from Laing the idea that a person who functions fairly well in society may suffer from a schizoid condition, that is, a profound division in his experience of himself and others. sees the key role of the 'good enough' mother as adaptation to the (Winnicott 1966, p. 6). . Zur Dynamik des sog. . In this way the baby comes to feel confident in being able to create objects and to create the actual world. * Willpower, * Behaviors Fourth, by writing the paper he is communicating his faith that this transcendent dimension that is each person’s essence is common to all and can be articulated in symbols. – Quotes The primary experience of the cosmos continues to be the background of his foregound experiences of moving his body, making gestures and sounds, relating to others, and symbolizing the meanings of his experience. Freud and Lacan, perhaps moderated by his completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to deal with Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. For example, the baby is presented with an object, such as the bottle, and that begins to shape how the baby will relate to external objects, through a process called object presenting. È importante che nelle prime fasi dello * Models * Conversation Voegelin occasionally mentions the importance of regular meditative practice to the maintainence of an open psyche (Voegelin 1974). Ogden (1990) provides the example of a mother helping a boy of two-and-one-half years take a bath, after his head has gotten under the water on a previous evening, by inviting him to “pour me some tea.”  Emerging from a tense, fearful state, the boy picks up an empty shampoo bottle and begins to use it to pour “milk” into his mother’s “teacup” to cool her “tea.”  The child has a sufficient capacity to experience being to be able to relax and become absorbed in the drama of the play. Winnicott viewed the baby as “an immature being who is all the time on the brink of unthinkable anxieties,” which concern “going to pieces,” “falling for ever,” “having no relationship to the body,” and “having no orientation” (Winnicott 1962, pp. Winnicott, D.W. (1960a), “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 140-152. Mirror-role of the mother and family in child * Marketing . * Workplace design, * Assertiveness false, contracted self and second reality                   expressed in creative living, play, that result from imaginative projection and                and communication with subjective, eclipse first reality                                                      objects; false, compliant self that lives through fantasizing. In my view, we can best make sense of Winnicott’s writings on these matters by assuming that, in addition to the meanings of fantasy and illusion indicated, Winnicott uses those terms to symbolize the infant’s experience of participation in reality, without being critically aware of the difference in meanings. 150). According to Voegelin, experiences of transcendence occur in ancient societies that symbolize reality solely in mythical terms, but the various realms of being are not clearly distinguished and acts of transcendence are not recognized as such, if they occur at all. Winnicott, D.W. (1986), Home is Where We Start From, ed., C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, and M. Davis (New York:  Norton). * Needs This group includes a range of people who vary in terms of the degree to which their defensive operations are intended to protect the true self and preserve the possibility of relationship with first reality in Voegelin’s sense, or to dominate and kill the true self and replace first reality with a second reality. It belongs to being alive. adaptation to her infant's needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less Hughes, G. (1998), “Twilight of the Gods:  The Problem of Divine Presence in the World After Differentiation” (unpublished paper delivered at the meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, September). children. This assumption creates a philosophical problem:  how does the infant move from that state to subsequent states in which he experiences himself as separate from but related to others (Ogden 1990)? * Sociology The mother’s care gives the infant sufficient existential security to be able to tolerate gradually greater degrees of satisfaction and frustration. It includes the management of experiences that are inherent in existence, such as the completion (and therefore the non-completion) of processes … which from the outside may seem to be purely physiological but which belong to infant psychology and take place in a complex psychological field, determined by the awareness and empathy of the mother . It is, as it were, under the baby’s magical control. The ordinary, good-enough mother’s holding and handling of her baby keeps his experience of annihilation anxieties at tolerable levels and, in interaction with his inborn maturational tendencies, allows the infant to come into existence as a person who can desire and experience frustration. . Winnicott spoke of the infant’s needs from his mother using the terms ‘holding’, ‘handling’ and ‘object-presenting’. From this position everything is creative.” (p. 56)  Psychological development can resume at the point where earlier trauma occurred if the client can surrender, in the presence of a trusting other, to the primary experience of the Cosmos and develop the trust to descend into and ascend from the depths of his own psyche. Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt According to Voegelin, one reason why masses of people are attracted to a comprehensive but false ideological system elaborated by a Hegel or a Comte is that it “permits the assuaging of anxiety by removing, with a show of legitimacy, the expressions of existential tension to one of the more or less deep cellars of the unconscious.”  The result is the loss of the life of reason, since “the critical center of rational discourse-i.e., the luminosity of existence-has been suppressed” (p. 157). By transitional phenomena he refers to all the aspects of human experience that involve and emerge from the infant’s use of transitional objects. In Stern’s theory, all the infant experiences in the first two months are primitive bits of experience emerging into self- and other-invariant constellations. Although there are few discussions of spiritual experience in his writings, on more than one occasion he observed that contemplation is an important source of a rich inner life, and his negative remarks about religion are always directed at dogma of one kind or another. I suggest that it is possible to incorporate the insights of Voegelin’s and Winnicott’s analyses of the true and false selves into a broad taxonomy of the order and disorders of the soul. . Winnicott argues that the good-enough mother’s holding, handling, and object presenting together enable the infant to develop the capacity to interact with the mother and others as separate, whole persons. True self, false self, Winnicott, D. (1953). The more differentiated language of Voegelin, for example the statements that man is “part of the whole” and a “partner in being” and indeed the more abstract term “participation,” also employs metaphor. The Moment of Illusion and the Existential Virtues. Thanks for a great service. The good enough mother will do this to the general satisfaction of the It is in the total set-up.” (Winnicott 1952a, p. 99), Winnicott uses the terms holding, handling, and object-presenting to refer to three aspects of the ordinary, good-enough mother’s care of her infant that are necessary conditions of his primitive emotional development. * Listening Winnicott emphasizes that the mother’s devoted care is a necessary condition of the infant’s successful maturation during this earliest period. In the fourth volume of Order and History he makes clear that both differentiations always include a pneumatic core and a noetic periphery. 3, Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge, LA:  Louisiana State University Press). can use object." In this condition what Laing calls a person’s “inner self” is occupied in fantasy and observation, observes the processes of perception and action, and attempts to be unaffected by events in the world, at least to a degree. . .” (p. 124)  Interpreting Plato in the Timaeus, Voegelin identifies the reality of the depth not with any of the intracosmic partners of the primary experience, but with “the underlying reality that makes them partners in a common order, i.e., with the substance of the Cosmos.” When we judge two symbolisms to be equivalent, “a truth of reality emerging from the depth recognizes itself as equivalent but superior to a truth previously experienced” (p. 131). The metaphors are equivalent to the Heraclitan symbol of descending into the depth that is so important for Voegelin. * Values, – About En effet, il ne peut se développer correctement sans la présence d’un être humain qui participe au Holding et au Handling : le Holding; qui est l’art de porter physiquement et psychiquement le bébé. – Changes .The holding environment . The “transition” in these terms refers to the period in infancy from about two months, when the baby begins to engage in sensorimotor and preverbal play, to about seven months, when his subjective sense of self and other emerges and he begins to engage in symbolic play. object. . * Coaching Basel:  Burg, 1944.”  Journal of Politics 10:  179-87. Later I found that the same type of analysis had been conducted on a much vaster scale by Plato, resulting in his concept of the metaxy-the In-Between. person who acts in the role of 'carer' who bonds with the child. handling and object-presenting. At about seven to nine months there emerges a third organizing experiential perspective, which Stern calls a sense of a subjective self and other. Large font | He could not recognize his ignorance as such, were he not in the throes of a restless urge to escape from ignorance (pheugein ten agnoian) in order to seek knowledge (episteme). For this reason Winnicott stresses that during this period we must not force the infant to have a premature awareness of his physical separateness from and dependence upon other people. and Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. . Yet Winnicott claims that the infant experiences the “moment of illusion” from the beginning, when the mother first presents her breast and herself to him. The mother has a breast and the power to produce milk, and the idea that she would like to be attacked by a hungry baby. . implies the recognition that the conscious subject occupies only a small area in the soul. * Storytelling Top | . * Rhetoric Menu | Guest articles | (Winnicott 1962, p. 62), We are concerned with an infant in a highly dependent state and totally unaware of this dependence . Over the course of several decades Donald Winnicott articulated a detailed theory of the infant’s development in the first year of life. – Students * Sequential requests reacting, and so preserves a continuity of being." After all, she was a baby once, and she has in her the memories of being a baby; she also has memories of being cared for, and these memories either help or hinder her in her own experience as a mother. accepting and surviving this onslaught with equanimity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34:89-97, Winnicott, D.W. (1955-6) Clinical varieties of transference.