Winnicott’s famous assertion that ‘there is no such thing as a baby’, as well as his preference for the expression ‘environment-individual set up’ as opposed to the term primary narcissism, stays close to the central tenet of Balint’s position emphasising the primacy of the relation (2004, 99). However, with Winnicott, much more so than with Balint, we are alerted to the function of illusion, especially with regard to the infant’s so-called omnipotence.
Freud expects to find in the narcissism of childhood an ‘exactly analogous attitude towards the external world’ as that which characterises ‘primitive peoples’, including
an over-estimation of the power of their wishes and mental acts, the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, a belief in the thaumaturgic force of words, and a technique for dealing with the external world — ‘magic’ — which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose premises. (1914a, 75)
Winnicott’s intervention underscores the extent to which the external world has to permit such grandiose premises in the infant:
The Mother, at the beginning, by an almost 100 per cent adaptation affords the infant the opportunity for the illusion that her breast is part of the infant. It is, as it were, under magical control. The same can be said in terms of infant care in general, in the quiet times between excitements. Omnipotence is nearly a fact of experience. The Mother’s eventual task is to disillusion the infant, but she has no hope of success unless at first she has been able to give sufficient opportunity for illusion. (2004, 238 my emphasis)
Omnipotence as nearly a fact of experience echoes Freud’s claim, seen above, that the infant almost realises the fiction of a psychical system driven exclusively by the pleasure principle without reference to its environment of care (1911a). For Winnicott, mothering involves an active adaptation to the infant which sustains the infant’s belief in an undifferentiated environment, followed by a tactful modulation of her attunement to the infant in order to ‘frustrate’ the infant out of the pleasure principle. Such are the tasks of the good-enough mother. We might suggest that by appreciating the mother-figure’s achievements, Winnicott implicitly recognises the dynamics of power and fantasy that bind the ‘nursing couple’ (whereas we recall that for Balint the harmony was ‘real’). However, we would do well not to overstate this; because, in Winnicott’s picture, the mother’s benign adaptation to her infant — which is ‘almost 100 per cent’ — is the default position, the disruptions to this position can only be cast as failures of maternal provision.4
In his well-known paper of 1967 on the ‘Mirror-Role of the Mother and Family in Child Development’, Winnicott puts forward the idea that ‘the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face’ for what the infant sees in it is himself (2005, 149; 151). With this idea we are introduced to the typically Winnicottian paradox of potentiality where the mother ‘gives back’ to the infant what he already has as potential. By understanding that ‘[i]n primary narcissism the environment is holding the individual, and at the same time the individual knows of no environment and is at one with it’, Winnicott seeks to emphasise that the mutuality of two can be felt as one (2004, 283). As well as a two that can be felt as one, however, there is also a Winnicottian third, namely the space of transition.
We experience life in the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals. (2005, 86)
The concept of an ‘intermediate area of experience’ between the infant and the mother — and in parallel terms between the individual and society — underlines Winnicott’s most important ideas concerning the human capacity for play, creativity and spontaneity as those experiences that enable both our understanding of individual authenticity — the ‘True Self’ — and of the location of cultural experience. Of course, Winnicott’s ‘True Self’, if left unqualified, is an inherently problematic notion for psychoanalysis (and theories of social constructionism more broadly); however, because it is rooted in the realm of potentiality, the authenticity of the True Self need not violate the anti-essentialisms of selfhood that psychoanalytic thought espouses. It is important to note that although there are resemblances to be discerned, Winnicott’s idea of the potential space does not map straightforwardly on to ideas of socialisation, acculturation or entry in to the symbolic order that we may be familiar with from other theoretical lexicons. Crucially, because this realm of transition is a gift from the good-enough mother, it remains tied to the paradoxes of unconscious fantasy; which is to say, it ‘happens only in relation to a feeling of confidence on the part of the baby, that is, confidence related to the dependability of the mother — figure or environmental elements […]’ (2005, 135). The logic of the transitional space, then, is neither the logic of primary process, nor the logic of egoic reality testing. Rather, Winnicott is describing ‘the hypothetical area that exists (but cannot exist) between the baby and the object (mother or part mother) during the phase of the repudiation of the object as not-me, that is, at the end of being merged in with the object’ (2005, 144). As the mother ‘allows the infant the illusion that what the infant creates really exists’ she sanctions the coexistence of reality and fantasy in the transitional space between the ‘Me’ and the ‘Not-Me’ (2004, 242).
When Winnicott’s conviction that we can speak of something called the ‘True Self’ fostered by the mother’s mirroring capacity meets Jacques Lacan’s insistence that any attained ‘self’ is the result of the specular seductions of the Imaginary order, we might suspect an impasse. Winnicott’s ‘Mirror-Role’ paper (1967), which takes inspiration from Lacan’s famous ‘Mirror Stage’ paper (1949), reflects the paediatrician’s close and careful analysis of infant-mother interaction, and foregrounds the function of the good-enough mirror-mother that allows the infant/patient to ‘find his or her own self’ and ‘to feel real’ (2005, 158). Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ offers what is, for the author, a rare piece of infant observation to illustrate an ‘ontological structure of the human world that fits in with [Lacan’s] reflections on paranoiac knowledge’ where the ego is formed upon ‘misrecognition’, and desire is driven by a constitutive ‘lack’ (Lacan, 2006 [1949]: 76). Thus Lacan is altogether less interested in the infant’s relation with an other subject as environment (i. e. the mother) which we have seen to be Winnicott’s express point of departure. Rather, the moment Lacan describes taking place between the infant and the infant’s reflection is one where the attraction of the image provides the Active reality for the emerging ego. This is both a developmental moment, and a position in the Imaginary order which persists as a structuring force beyond infancy. It is important that this determining imaginary is staged as an encounter with the mirror’s reflecting surface and does not comprise an intersubjective relation, or even, minimally, a relation with the maternal face. This way our attention is drawn to the status of the image. The paradox of Winnicott’s good-enough mother is that she is able to provide what is already there in potentia; in her reflective role, she is ‘the constitutive witness of the [infant’s] True Self’ (Phillips, 1997: 130). Good-enough mothering, then, enacts a correspondence with what is authentic in the infant. In Lacan’s picture, however, mutuality becomes mimesis; it is the infant who adapts and responds to his reflection and takes in an image which does not correspond to himself. Why, we might ask, would the infant appropriate such a non-correspondence? The answer to this question reminds us that the pleasure principle is never far from hand; Lacan contends that the uncoordinated and discordant infant jubilantly assumes [‘jubilant assumption’] an image that possesses the coherence and stability which his psychic and bodily experiences lack. In making a narcissistic identification with his reflection in this way, the captivated infant ‘fix[es] it in his mind’ and sets forth on an egoic journey of misrecogni — tions that forever re-inscribe his primordial alienation (Lacan, 2006: 76). Thus, far from affirming an authentic self as the mirror-mother does for Winnicott (which can only be a reflection of the goodness located in the mother herself), the ‘gestalt’ form that the Lacanian infant stumbles across and eagerly adopts is constitutive of his narcissistic ego.
For Winnicott the False Self is a defence organisation ‘designed for the protection of the true self’s core’ the existence of which ‘results in [a] sense of futility’ (2004, 292). But crucially this falsity is (only) the contingent result of the failure of the maternal environment — where ‘the environment behaves not well enough’ (291). This is to say, that it is the True Self which is immanent and able to reveal itself through the combination of the infant’s potentiality, and good-enough mothering (or analytic reparation via the couch). Conversely, Lacan stresses that the entirety of the ego structure is built up as a defence: the ego is a fictional unity of self derived from an act of imaginary identification. By asserting that ‘the specular I turns into the social I’, Lacan emphasises that the act of misrecognition at the mirror stage will not be rectified through the subject’s reconciliation to the reality principle, or via appropriate environmental provision (Lacan, 2006: 79). Rather, this founding narcissistic act instantiates the characteristically human mode of being-in-the-world where the norms of integrity and autonomy, and the imagined boundaries between self and other, comprise the phantasmagoria of social life.
By theorising the lie of identity at the heart of social experience in this way, Lacan’s story of origins resonates strongly with themes of sociological postmodernity. His account also lends itself to an analysis of how illusions of self-identity are sustained and extended through cultural life, in particular through the formations of a consumerist culture which provides a myriad of opportunities for misrecognition via the saleable products, images and lifestyles that purport to reflect something of our ‘true’ selves. But rather than rehearse the established affinities between the Lacanian tale of the mirror and the various sociological coordinates of the postmodern — fragmentation, schizophrenia, simulacra, spectacle, hyperreality and so on — I would like to begin to engage with the epistemological difficulty that Lacan’s work alerts us to by way of its emphasis on the status of the image. By giving prominence to the captivating power of the ‘surface’, Lacanian psychoanalysis destabilises the well-forged links between the identity of the modern subject, and the depth of his psychic ‘authenticity’. One could argue that this act of deconstruction raises the possibility of our emancipation from the search for the truth of the self which has been so readily identified as a definitive feature of contemporary culture (see Chapter 4). And yet, to my mind, it does not follow that an embrace of the Lacanian position would necessarily loosen the stranglehold that the quest for a ‘true’ self-identity has on contemporary culture, because, most simply, it does not follow that cultural investments in the truth of selfhood are weakened when the status of ‘truth’ is exposed as a narcissistic mirage.
In the following section we will consider more fully the status of Narcissus’ self-love and ask whether there may be a reconciliation to be had between the primary and authentic relationality of the subject and the environment (posited in different ways by Balint and Winnicott), and the primary and constitutive act of misrecognition foregrounded by Lacan. To do this I shall develop my exploration of the mirror motif in conjunction with a reading of the Narcissus myth, and take up the question of how Narcissus recognises (or misrecognises) the image with which he is besotted.