Donald Winnicott And His Theory Of The False Self

Donald Winnicott was a famous psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and English pediatrician who developed an interesting approach to the human personality. Because of his training as a pediatrician, he focused on thoughts, reflections and theories about children. And especially about the relationship between mother and baby, and the consequences of this relationship. Apart from this, he also developed the interesting theory of the false self.

He worked with the famous psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, and even treated one of her own children with her. He was also the leader of the British Psychoanalytic Society and a very famous thinker of the twentieth century.

Throughout his life, he also highlights the concepts of “good enough mother” and “ordinary devoted mother”. In the same way, his concept of the “transition object” is something that many psychological schools have adopted.

The relationship between mother and baby, according to Winnicott

In line with other psychoanalysts , Winnicott says that mother and child during the first year of life form a unit. You can not talk about the baby as a device that is separate from its mother, he says. The two form an indivisible mental unit.

Winnicott says that the mother is the first “context” a human being has. She is the total basis for the subsequent development. Therefore, and especially in the first months of life, the mother is the child’s universe. The mother is practically synonymous with the world.

Then Winnicott’s concept of “good enough mother” is shown. She provides the necessary care for the child, spontaneously and sincerely. She is willing to be all that the child needs. As a mother, she is not perfect, but she does not neglect the baby, nor does she overprotect it. This helps to create the true self.

Meanwhile, the “ordinary devoted mother” is one who is too attached to or too protective of her child. She is not able to respond adequately to the child’s spontaneous needs. This gives rise to what Winnicott calls the false self.

Winnicott and the false self

The mother is like a mirror to the child. The little one sees himself as his mother looks at him. The child learns to identify with humanity through her. Little by little, the baby is separated from its mother, and she has to adapt to this change. The child has spontaneous movements that are part of his development as an individual. If the mother enjoys them, he experiences the feeling of being real. If she does not, a sense of unreality is created.

When this interaction between the mother and her baby fails, something that Winnicott calls “experiences of existential continuity” occurs. In other words, there has been a radical disruption of the baby’s spontaneous development. This is essentially what leads to the false self.

Winnicott points out that under these circumstances, the baby becomes “his own mother.” This means that he begins to hide himself to protect himself. He learns to show only what his mother wants to see. He becomes something he is not.

The effect of the false self

There are different levels of “falsehood” within ourselves. According to Winnicott, it is at the most basic level those who adopt a polite attitude and comply with all rules and regulations. At the other end of the scale is schizophrenia, a mental state in which the person is separated from himself to the point where his real self almost disappears.

For Winnicott, in all serious mental illnesses, a false self dominates. In these cases, the person uses all the resources available to him to build the false self-esteem and maintain them. The purpose of this is for him to be able to face a world that is perceived as unpredictable or unreliable.

Winnicott says that most of the efforts of a person with a very strong false self are oriented towards the intellectualization of reality. This means that they are trying to transform reality into something that can be justified, but without feelings, emotions or creative actions. When such intellectualization succeeds, the individual is perceived as normal. But he does not experience what he lives out as something that is truly his, but rather as something foreign to him.

He is never able to feel happy about his successes, nor to feel valued, even though others may see that value in him. As far as he knows, it is his false self that has achieved it or his false self-esteem that is valued. This only creates a breakdown with oneself and with the world. His true self is trapped, fantasizes about and experiences a despair that it can never understand by itself.