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Donald Woods Winnicott distinguished three major maternal functions in his study of the role of the environment in the processes of maturation of the infant's ego: holding, which conditions the integration process; handling, which makes possible "personalization" or "psyche indwelling in the soma"; and lastly, object-presenting, which underlies the building of the earliest object relations.

Winnicott essentially expounded the notion of integration in two important papers: "Primitive Emotional Development" (delivered at the November 28, 1945 meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society) and "Ego-integration in Child Development" (1962).

Integration presupposes the existence of an initial state of nonintegration, on the basis of which the individual, not yet differentiated from his or her environment, tends to become organized into a unique being by the coming together of multiple varied and fragmented experiences. In Winnicott (1981), Claude Geets described the process in these terms: "These early experiences are at first sensory and motor: that which will become an I is at this point only a mass of dispersed, unconnected sensations. At the end of the integration process, there is what Winnicott calls the establishing of a unitary self: the subject (from now on) has the sense of existing as an individual entity" (p. 73).

Two types of experiences intervene in the transition from primary nonintegration to successful integration: first, the care the infant receives, "whereby an infant is kept warm, handled and bathed and rocked and named" (Winnicott, 1945/1958, p. 140), and second, the acute instinctual experiences that "tend to gather the personality together from within" (p. 140). Indeed, Winnicott very strongly emphasized the effects of the encounter between the (future) subject and the object, the impact of which is central, according to him, in the constitution of the infant's self.

Nonintegration thus has a natural place in the course of the individual's development, and every individual temporarily returns to that state during moments of rest, relaxation, or dreams, provided that he or she has enough trust in the environment to yield to this regressive movement. Winnicott linked creativity and artistic experience in adults to the ability to remain in contact with this nonintegrated, primitive self, just as the subject must be able to experience a return to a state of nonintegration in psychoanalysis.

Nonintegration is thus a positive, structuring phenomenon that must be clearly distinguished from disintegration of the personality (or fear of disintegration). The latter is to be situated within the realm of psychopathology as a modality of defense against a return to a state of nonintegration, for in Winnicott's view, madness is never a regression, but instead a last, pathetic resort against regression.

BERNARD GOLSE

See also: False self; Good-enough mother; Handling; Holding; Paranoid-schizoid position; Self (true/false).