She waits until the adults have finished before she asks for anything. She takes her plate to the sink without it being mentioned. She has never once had to be told twice, and she does not cut into a conversation, and when the visitors are here she sits where she is put and stays there.
Nobody in the house finds this strange. She is the one person there who never makes any extra work.
What state are we in when we are born?
We are born in pieces.
What is in pieces is the self. By ‘self’ I don’t mean a name or an age or a list of things you’re good at. I mean the bare sense that you are here at all. And that sense does not come pre-assembled.
A newborn has sensations and states — hunger, warmth, fear, relief — but does not yet experience them as parts of one continuous self. The sense of “I am the same person across all these moments” develops later.
At first, the person caring for the baby holds the pieces together for her. When the baby cries, that person finds out why; when she is startled, that person calms her down. Because this happens in the same way, time after time, the baby gets from hunger to being fed, or from a fright to calm, without the hunger or the fright ever becoming more than she can bear.
We usually picture a baby as a complete person who only needs to grow bigger. The body is complete. The sense of being one person is not. At birth, that sense is like a pot whose pieces have been set in place but not yet glued. A loud noise or a sudden jolt, and the pieces come apart. What glues them, little by little, is care repeated day after day.
What joins the pieces?
The British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a name for what the caregiver does here: holding. The caregiver shields the baby from what is too much for someone so small — the loud noise, the sudden jolt — and responds reliably enough that separate moments of hunger, distress and comfort start to join up into the experience of being one person.
Holding has two sides. One is physical: the baby is picked up and carried, and while she is very small, that side matters more. But the emotional side is there from the start too, and that is the side I want to look at here.
Holding a child emotionally means welcoming her: accepting her as she is, paying attention to her, and letting her see that you are amazed by her.
Consider the fuss a parent can make over a full diaper. An adult who is otherwise a serious person will pitch her voice up half an octave and announce that this is the most remarkable thing she has seen: “Look at that! Would you look at what you did!” Somebody else is called in to look.
Now measure the reaction against the event. The baby has not achieved anything. She has not tried. She could not have done otherwise, and she has no idea what the fuss is about. The reaction is wildly, comically out of proportion to what happened — and the very size of the reaction is the message. What it says is not well done. What it says is: what comes out of you is welcome here, and you did not have to earn that.
And then it happens again, the next day and the day after that, and in between there are a thousand smaller versions of it — the face that lights up when she wakes, the voice that changes register the moment she is picked up. To the adults, these are small, everyday things. Nobody in the house would remember any of them afterward.
No single moment builds the self. What glues the pieces, one at a time, is the repetition: the baby shows a need, someone notices, and nobody pulls away. Over time, she learns that she can let out what is inside her and still keep the people she depends on.
The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called the result a cohesive self: a self whose pieces have joined and now hold together.
None of this means giving a baby everything she wants. It means staying close, in ways she can predict, until whatever she is feeling has come out and she has settled again.
Growing up in pieces
Now picture the same scene with a parent who is irritated from the start. The full diaper gets a scolding instead: “You wouldn’t go when I told you to, and now you go in your diaper?”
Not a cruel parent. An impatient one. The necessary things get done — she is fed, she is changed — but with an air of getting it over with. Later, once she can talk, this parent is already answering before she has finished her sentence, and meets her second question by asking why she is still asking. She is looked after, but never once welcomed.
In a house like that, the glue never sets. The pieces stay pieces.
A child whose pieces never joined has to spend her attention holding herself together. Anything new that is asked of her, any strong feeling, even someone coming close, can be too much, so she pushes people away before they can knock the pieces loose. From outside this looks cold or difficult. From inside it is protection against falling apart.
Where does your attention go when your hand is cut?
Cut your hand and every bit of your attention goes to that hand. You will find yourself carrying it slightly raised. Walking down an ordinary street you curl it in, in case somebody knocks it. Somebody comes toward you and your whole body turns a few degrees to put the hand on the far side.
Nobody has touched your hand. You’ve flinched in advance, repeatedly, at nothing.
You are also, for the duration, extremely poor company. Someone is telling you about their week and you are tracking a stranger’s shoulder at the edge of your vision. You are not being self-absorbed. You are guarding something, and guarding takes everything.
To anyone else in the room, though, it just looks as if you only care about yourself. A self that is still in pieces is like that hand: guarding it takes all the attention a person has. So when someone seems to think only of themselves, it may be that they are hurting.
The child who watches the adults
A small child is entitled to think only of herself. At that age, every child’s self is still fragile, like that cut hand, so all her attention goes to herself. Where would she find any left over for anybody else?
So when a small child starts paying attention to the grown-ups instead of to herself, something has gone the wrong way round. It can happen, for example, when a parent often blows up or is often depressed. Then the child has to manage the mood of the house, because she is only safe when the parent is calm. Here is what she does.
She knows which evenings not to ask for anything. She can tell from the sound of the front door how the next hour is going to go, and she adjusts before anyone has spoken. When someone asks one of the adults an awkward question, she answers it before they have to. She never lets other people see her wanting anything.
Adults are delighted by her. “She’s so grown up,” they say.
I do not see maturity here. I see a symptom: a sign that this child has been deeply hurt. She has learned that she is safe only if she keeps watch on the adults, so she reads their faces before she has even noticed what she herself needs. She makes sure she is no trouble, because asking, interrupting or wanting might irritate an adult, or cost her the care she depends on.
The praise covered the wound
A child who throws tantrums wears the adults out. She is inconvenient, and inconvenience gets investigated — somebody eventually sits down and asks what is going on with her.
The child who is no trouble is never inconvenient, so nobody investigates. She gets compliments instead. People tell her parents they have done a lovely job. Teachers write that she is a pleasure to have in class. Relatives compare her, out loud and in front of her, to the cousin who is a handful.
So nobody finds out that she is hurting, and she never gets the chance to find out either. There is praise lying over the sore place, and praise is not a thing anybody thinks to look underneath.
Worse, the praise teaches her to go on being no trouble. Asking for nothing is what earns her warmth and approval, so, to keep them coming, she holds back more and more of what she needs. She comes to feel that the moment she says “this is hard,” she will let her parents down. And the better she gets at looking as if she needs no one, the less likely any adult is to notice that she is anxious, lonely, or afraid to need anyone.
If you were a child like this, you may still be hearing the same praise today. That you’re no trouble. That you never need anything. That you always manage. That praise is no proof that you were safe. It is worth asking what you had to hold back to earn it.
References
- Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — holding.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In Winnicott (1965), listed above. — the child who fits herself to what the adults need.
- Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — the cohesive self.
Related
- The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
- Nobody Calls the Lion Evil: Where Your Drive Comes From
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board