Paranoid-schizoid Position, Infantile Omnipotence, and the fears of taking over the Oedipal Project

I’ve been re-reading chunks of Winnicott’s The Maturational Processes and The Facilitating Environment.  He really is a striking and unique writer within the realm of psychoanalytic theory.  A few things that have jumped out at me before making one larger point:

1.)      He’s one of the few theorists I have seen talk about time as an experiential phenomenon and not just a developmental one.  There are some passages in the text that talk about the experience of time by the infant and the “auxiliary-ego function” of the mother in helping the infant to develop time-sense, especially as it pertains to navigating anxiety as an affect.

2.)     He acknowledges a philosophical and religious indebtedness to his idea of the False Self, but gives no indication what it was he was reading that led to his development of this concept.  I would certainly be interested to know what philosophical foundations—beyond Freud—Winnicott was drawing on in developing some of these ideas.  His work can be such that it would make sense if he were to have some basis in the continental tradition and folks like Husserl and Heidegger.  Though, being British, you would expect his exposure to be more rooted in the analytic tradition.  I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out Winnicott had at least a passing interest in East Asian philosophies and Buddhism in particular.

3.)     There’s a similar process to reading Winnicott as there is to reading Freud, in the sense that much of what people discuss when they talk about Winnicott (the good-enough mother, holding environment, potential space) will often get introduced, not as central concepts that are put forward in standalone papers, but as concepts he develops within the contexts of other frameworks or ideas.  That’s not to say that some of the central ideas aren’t also useful, but I think speaks more to the richness and lyricism of his writing, to the degree that even the ways he goes about describing what he presumably thought were mundane phenomena get picked up as being theoretically valuable.

The larger point I want to address in some detail is something related to his interpretation of Melanie Klein (and I think indirectly Fairbairn).  Specifically, Winnicott seems at times to ascribe to the ideas Klein poses about infantile paranoid-depressive states and the progression from the paranoid to the depressive position.  This notion comes up quite a bit in the essay “The Development of the Capacity for Concern”, though is signaled in some of the other essays as well.

What I find fascinating about this is Winnicott’s willingness to posit this theory alongside his own about the omnipotence of the child, without any sense of conflict or ambiguity about what that juxtaposition might entail.  Initially, it would seem to me, that the idea of the infant feeling both omnipotently in control of its own environment, while simultaneously finding itself in the paranoid position and in constant fear of invasive malevolence, would be inherently contradictory.  How is it that we could effectively imagine the infant as both maintaining a sense of complete control and consumed with the projected fears of its own vulnerability?

One response, though one that admittedly lands a bit flat and unsatisfying, I think has something to do with the projective capacities of the infant.  The overall notion being that of a process whereby the infant projects their own anxieties and hostilities out onto the other, thereby disavowing themselves of the need to maintain a position which acknowledges their own hostile feelings.  This projection leads to a feeling of paranoia, which the infant then seeks an object in the environment to sooth.  These anxiety signals are received and responded to by the caregiver, placing the infant in the vicinity of the kind of omnipotence Winnicott identified, wherein the infant’s feelings of omnipotence are indulged in as much as the mother is able to consistently and effectively respond to the infant, up until that point where the infant has the ego strength to bear some dissatisfaction of their instinctual urges.

This explanation is fine, and may in fact carry some kernel of truth, but it’s also so clinical that it rings hollow.  Another way of framing this that feels more resonant to me borrows from thinking about this in terms of Oedipal organizations.  Norman O. Brown, a writer and social philosopher popular in the 60’s and 70’s, offered a reformulation of the Oedipal Complex that to me feels far more phenomenological and richer than the traditional application of the concept.  Brown’s rendering recontextualized the notion as an “Oedipal Project” to more effectively communicate its ongoing nature and inability to ever be truly satisfied or resolved.  For Brown, the project is not that one must kill their father to be able to freely seduce their mother, but that this metaphorically represents a need to overcome our dependency on our caregivers to be able to provide for ourselves what we need.  It posits that the ongoing recognition of our separation from, and the subsequent absence of, our mother demands that we become our own father.  It’s a reflection on personal agency and the ways in which we overtake and resist overtaking it.  It suggests a need to become the “creator and sustainer” of our own existence.

I think this kind of reflection on personal agency holds open the kind of space we need so we can maintain the apparent contradiction of the Kleinian-Winnicottian continuum between vulnerability and omnipotence.  In fact, oddly enough, that kind of construct helps to reveal a way in which the ambiguity of the contradiction gets rendered as working bidirectionally, thereby illuminating more fully the lived experience of what this complicated dynamic actual feels like, and oddly enough I think helps to contain the two ideas in some kind of conceptual unity.

Let us reverse our understanding first, and then we will see if it allows us to more effectively construct an experiential version of what we have already outlined.  I think one thing Brown was onto, in as much as he described the reconceptualization as an Oedipal project, is the fact that, though we may all realize a need to take over our own existence, there is something about that which is also terrifying and which we are all inclined, in some capacity, to want to resist.  One way of resisting is, I think, not through self-pity or a kind of over-indexing on interpersonal dependence, but through the illusion of a kind of omnipotence and demand for an environmental acknowledgement of one’s own invulnerability.  Both of which are really two sides of the same sort of narcissistic entitlement that can often be used to ward off the need for personal agency and accountability.

In as much as this kind of defense then fails, this produces an existential anxiety that is intolerable, leading to a need to project those feelings outward, most commonly through an insistence on the various problems in the environment which are impeding the ability to effectively manage and maintain one’s own life.  These get recontextualized as representing a hostile and malevolent environment which is constantly conspiring to work against us and undermine our pathways to personal growth and self-actualization.  Constant engagement with the environment then demands that one double down on their available defenses, producing more paranoia or conviction about our perception that the world wants to thwart our attempts at better living, sustaining a cycle which allows for the absolution of personal accountability and responsibility.

All of this isn’t to negate the idea that there are in fact powerful and oppressive forces that are constantly getting in the way of individuals’ ability to achieve personal growth.  Never mind that overwhelming and deeply entrenched systems like sexism, racism, biases against sexual and gender identity, even some of the basic socioeconomic and political structures of our system can leave a person feeling powerless and needing to encase oneself in confusing and rapidly oscillating illusions of grandiosity and powerlessness.  This is more a commentary on how those experiences (real or imagined) get internalized and responded to by the individual.  Rather than being contradictory or working against each other, there is a way of imagining these two concepts operating in fantasy to be mutually sustaining and collaborative enjoined to one another. 

For Winnicott, the way out is through a move towards independence, development of (in the words of psychoanalysis) ego-strength, and embracing the possibilities of paradox, play, and potential space.  Klein notes a need to move from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive one, which for Klein implies some kind of ownership of our own malevolent tendencies, whole-object relations, and a necessary mourning of the idealized good-object.  There’s something powerful in there about the relationship between grief, independence, and ambiguity.  Of course there is going to be an impulse to move away from that kind of mode of existence through a regression towards an absolute dependence while simultaneously reconstituting the various ways we defend against acknowledging that dependence.  In fact, it may very likely be necessary for us to be able to do that at times.  The question is much more about the degree to which we can resist indulging in that position and how much we are willing to endure the disillusionment of what it means to take responsibility for our own existence.