Winnicott:Hate in the Countertransference

Winnicott:
Hate in the Countertransference

Contents
Introduction 1
What then is countertransference for Winnicott? 1
What may the therapist feel working with the client? 1
Hate from the therapist 2
The environment of therapy 2
Why the client needs hate. 3
Winnicott and Existentialism 3


Introduction
Winnicott's paper hate in the countertransferance looks at the position of hate in therapy. He sees therapy as the repetition of the maternal relation and as an attempt to correct any of the inadequacies of the initial mother infant relationship.

What then is countertransference for Winnicott?
1. Abnormal countertransference
a. The therapist identifies with what the client says and what is identified with is repressed by the therapist and they react to the client in abnormal or unfamiliar ways
2. Objective countertransference
a. Where the client replays a previous relationship with the therapist and the therapist has a very conscious and considered feeling, which can be hate or love

What may the therapist feel working with the client?
For Winnicott, the patient understands the therapist in terms of their own way of being in the world. Thus the psychotic whose early environment didn’t afford the ability for integration, realization and personalisation and leads to a psychotic relationship with the world, i.e. delusional and erratic will understand the therapist in these terms. To explain these three terms. Integration is the process of pulling together the soma and the psyche both individually and together. Realisation is orientating oneself within space and time. Personalisation is the process of understanding oneself in ones particularity, as rooted in this mind and this body and distinct from you. Thus the psychotic can have coincident love hate states of feeling, this is to say I believe that there is no integration of feelings in the patients world merely coincidence. Thus the therapist who currently shows love could also show hate, in reciprocation the client can show love as much as hate to the therapist without rational or integration between the two.

Hate from the therapist
There are then three aspects of how the therapist may feel hate. Firstly through transference from the client, secondly through the clients behaviour triggering repressed hateful feelings, i.e. abnormal countertransference and thirdly through the clients actual behaviour i.e. objective countertransference.
There are ways that the therapist can assuage these feelings of hate. They can see it as a necessary evil of therapy that can be put up with for the higher cause which they are involved in, the pay, the training or helping people.
However Winnicott sees hate as a sometime necessary reaction that should not be shied away from but should when the client is ready be handed back to them in a manageable form. For Winnicott therapy is the replaying of the inadequate prior mother infant relationship. What the mother / therapist needs to do has two central aspects. Firstly they need to provide a continual stable environment such that all aspects of the child/client can be acknowledge and engaged with such that the child/client can integrate these aspects into a unified whole. Secondly any aspect of the external or internal world that is acknowledged or handed back to the child/client must be done in manageable doses. The primitive state of the child/client is unintegrated where there is no connection between emotional or physical events the child that cries has no relation to the child who laughs. The mother who feeds has no relation to the mother who is absent. Gradually integration of self happens, gradually the distinction of the self to world happens and gradually the awareness of the other happens as does the relation between these components. If the difference between the current development of these structure is too small to cope with a piece handed back to the child/client then disintegration can happen. The unintegrated state is for Winnicott, the origins of man; we also carry it with us and is the font of creativity within our lives. For Winnicott we are poor if we are only sane The unintegrated state can only be managed or accessed in later life if there is a stable enough holding environment to support it. The disintegrated state is a terrifying plunge from integration to disintegration where the integrated state collapses and the holding environment doesn’t support the unintegrated state.
Thus the therapist needs to provide both the acknowledgement of all of the client and to only acknowledge those bits that the client can safely integrate. Thus the client can provide feelings of hate in the therapist. If the client’s relationship with the client or themselves is not significantly integrated or stable to withstand it, then the therapist must withhold this feeling. As the clients relationships with self and therapist strengthen the this hate can either be acknowledged directly or drip fed until the structure is in place to support this. There is something in all of us that we hate, for Winnicott a client needs objective love and this requires all parts of the client to be acknowledged and this includes the hated part, thus it can be necessary for the therapist to hate the client and for the client to be able to access this hate to know the objective love.

The environment of therapy

The analyst must be prepared to bear strain without expecting the patient to know anything about what he is doing, perhaps even for a long time. For psychotics and people who have not had an adequate early maternal relationship the environment that the therapist provides that does more work than the interpretation. For the neurotic the couch and warmth and comfort may be symbolic of the mothers love for the psychotic it would actually be it.
Winnicott sees that people can test their environment and seeks proof that he can be hated to get proof that he is truly loved. This is quite an outlandish thought, to think of the impossibly behaved teenager as wanting to be hated such that he can prove the love of his parents.
Winnicott sees the mother as hating the baby before the baby hates the mother. Winnicott calls part of the initial relationship between infant ruthless love where the infant cares for nothing but his own desires and will attack his environment in a wild rage including his mother if he doesn’t get his way. Winnicott uses the term ruthless love to distinguish a hate which doesn’t intend to hurt, as there is no distinction at this stage of self and other.
Thus in the therapeutic relationship the therapist must be open to the ruthless love of the client which may hate him, hurt him use him for his needs then dispense with him when his needs are done. In spite of all this the therapist as with the mother must be able to tolerate hating her baby/client without doing anything about it, in the non expectant hope that reward will come.

Without hating the client/child’s hate they will never integrate this, will never be able to tolerate their own hate. Hate is also seen as a crude way of loving

Why the client needs hate.
Winnicott’s development process sees hate as a central part. An infant initially exists as omnipotent if he has a good enough mother, where there is the sense that when he wants he gets, and contra wise when he doesn’t want he doesn’t get. Should the mother get this wrong badly enough then the child can create a false self, a compliant self as they find their own desires too traumatising. In the omnipotent stage the infant is not aware of their mother as a separate being and engages with their mother with ruthless love, in the way they would engage with their own desires. As the infant develops and the world is handed by the mother piece by piece, there is integration of the child’s soma and psyche and indeed in each aspect so the infant realises that he is the same infant who cries as the one who smiles. At each stage the infant needs to feel safe that they can move onto the next stage and a key element of this is when they realise that they are the same infant who loves and hates the mother. The mother makes this real in the infant by hating him. Klein talks about this as the depressive position whereas Winnicott talks about the position of concern.

This position of realising that you hate the person that you also love brings the idea of concern and care. When you realise you hate the person you love, you then start to think about caring for them, and developing feelings of guilt to guide this. Infants, who have been deficient in this stage, show no care of concern for those around them as they were not appropriately hated, and never integrated their love and their hate.


Winnicott and Existentialism
Winnicott is interesting sure, putting the relationship back into the arena of psychopathology and is an interesting development from Freud who had the psyche only as the arena of psychopathology. Whilst Winnicott adds something to the psyche’s development process by adding the mother in, the area he misses is what happens to the adult.
The well adjust child who had a good enough mother still has to face death, uncertainty and groundlessness. So as an aid to good parenting with Winnicott you can’t go wrong. As an aid to reparenting with Winnicott you can’t go wrong. However there are many areas of pain people suffer that are not to do with the outcome of their parenting.