International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis | Holding

Holding is the process by which the mother's capacity to identify with her infant enables her to provide sensitive physical support, especially when the child is physiologically vulnerable. This provision of ego support is a "form of loving" that provides the basis for the establishment of integrated psychological development.

Donald Winnicott presented his ideas on holding and infant development to the public, and to those directly responsible for infant care (1947), and formulated these in psychoanalytic terms at the 22nd International Psychoanalytic Congress at Edinburgh in his seminal paper "The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship" (1960).

Sensitive physical handling by the mother allows the baby to tolerate frustrations such as hunger and discomfort and experience the gradual diminishment of his sense of omnipotence without going to pieces. Holding, at the beginning, is a series of physical acts which include responding to the baby's skin, feeding, and a group of sensory sensitivities built into the whole routine of day to day care. This is continued as necessary ego support throughout childhood and adolescence.

When practicing as a pediatrician during and after World War II, Winnicott addressed many groups, including parents and nursery care workers, about the essential qualities of infant care. In describing the minute details of ordinary breast-feeding, he was able to demonstrate how the "good-enough mother" provides sensitive physical and psychological holding of her baby. She identifies with her infant to know how the child feels and to provide just what it needs. In the holding phase, this fosters the baby's apparent belief that what it wanted, it created. It has then a hopeful sense of itself in the present and over time. Successful holding provides the baby with the feeling of reliability in the world, both internal and external. The average mother provides this reliability almost without thinking; and by small increments of frustration allows her baby to become "disillusioned" and aware that there is a "me" and "not-me" and a world that in fact it cannot control. Successful holding is the mothers handling of her infant through a "mutuality of cross identifications" and leads to an integration of the self.

Winnicott is clear that these processes in infancy are not the same as the pathological mental mechanisms of the disturbed or borderline adult patient, but those infants who have been significantly "let down" (1970) experience unthinkable anxieties and the later possibility of schizoid states. Winnicott also described holding within the analytic relationship and more broadly in casework with adult patients (1960). When the analyst's mind wanders, it can be experienced by the patient as a failure to "hold" the mind.

Although mention is made of the father's role in later phases (1960), Winnicott focuses his attention more on the immediacy of the mother-baby interaction and less on the conditions within the adult couple and family needed to foster a successful holding phase.

PAUL CAMPBELL

See also: Breastfeeding; Breakdown; Dead mother complex; Framework of the psychoanalytic treatment; Good-enough mother; Handling; Integration; Maternal; Maternal care; Object; Protective shield, breaking through the; Psychosomatic limit/boundary; Self-mutilation in children; Splitting of the object.