“Without the mother, there’s no such thing as the baby because the baby’s feeling of self-worth is mirrored off of the mother.”- derived from the theory of D.W. Winnicott (1958)
There’s so much literature about how to bond with your baby and what is the most appropriate way to establish attachment while encouraging autonomy. Throughout this podcast we will be looking at the theorist who laid a foundation for ways to establish adaptive attachment between children and their parents.
DW Winnicott pediatrician psychoanalyst and pioneer of the object relations theory says that:
The first "object" in someone is usually an internalized image of one's mother an infant relating to the breast or things in one's inner world (one's internalized image of others).[4] Later experiences can reshape these early patterns, but objects often continue to exert a strong influence throughout life.
Winnicott also introduced the concepts of the “transitional phenomena” and the “transitional object” (Winnicott, 1958). He had observed that children, if separated from their mothers, generally keep and cling to objects such as stuffed animals or blankets. His explanation for this behavior was that such preferred objects function as “transitional objects” and represent the absent mother (Brisch, 2012, p.68).
What is the “good enough mother?” Winnicott’s theory as explained on Psychology today:
As time goes by, however, the mother allows the infant to experience small amounts of frustration. She is empathetic and caring but does not immediately rush to the baby's every cry. Of course, at first the time-limit to this frustration must be very short. She may allow the baby to cry for a few minutes before her nighttime feeding, but only for a few minutes. She is not "perfect" but she is "good enough" in that the child only feels a slight amount of frustration.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/suffer-the-children/201605/what-is-good-enough-mother
Theories of John Bowlby & Mary Ainsworth
He was inspired by his own childhood upbringing in which he was raised in an upper-middle-income family. He was the fourth of six children and was brought up by a nanny as most children in Britain of his class where during that time period. John Bowlby was sent to boarding school when he was 7 and had conflicting thoughts of whether boarding school is conducive to a child’s establishment of attachment and producing a well adjusted adult.
Both Bowlby & Mary Ainsworth-believed that there needed to be a continuation of bonding between the children and their mother; parents must establish a bond early on so that the child will develop secure attachment. Mary Ainsworth was a student of Bowlby.
“A child has an innate (i.e. inborn) need to attach to one main attachment figure. This is called monotropy. This concept of monotropy suggests that there is one relationship which is more important than all the rest” McLeod, S. A. (2017, Febuary 05). Bowlby's Attachment Theory. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/bowlby.html
Mary Ainsworth & John Bowlby’s Experiment “A Strange Situation”
Video-A Strange Situation