Mother's Role in Infant Self-Identity

Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott were both psychotherapists who belonged to the British Psychoanalytic Society. Klein and Winnicott had practices working with disturbed children. They both studied and accepted the work of Freud, although they both expanded and altered his theories on child development. Despite these facts in common, Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott had very different theories. Melanie Klein was a firm believer in the child's innate ability to fantasize on a complex level and did not give much credence to the role of the mother during early infancy. She gave credit to the innate instincts in determining a child's development. D.W. Winnicott, on the other hand, believed that the mother has an important impact on the baby's development from birth. He believed that the environment the child inhabited was the key to a child's development. The differences in their theories of a mother's role in an infant's developing self-identity may stem from differences in their own childhoods.

Melanie Klein was born in Austria in 1882 as Melanie Raize. Her father was a physician. She was the product of a second marriage (Grosskurth, 1987, p. 6). Her father's first marriage was arranged in Orthodox Jewish tradition and failed. He remarried; after he had three children, the family moved to Vienna. This did not improve his finances, and he began a dental practice while his wife ran a plant and reptile shop. Melanie Klein began life in poverty with two working pare

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minate all the variables like emotions and treated life as instinctual. Winnicott preferred the clinical part of his studies involving contact with real people. His favorite area of study was pediatrics. This became his specialty. Winnicott liked to deal with the whole person, his or her family and social setting. When Winnicott discovered the psychoanalysis being done by Freud, he was intrigued. Psychoanalysis bridged the gap between biology and what he was observing in his medical practice (Davis & Wallbridge, 1981, p. 13). Psychoanalysis extended for Winnicott the ability of science to enter the area of personality development, emotions, and human conflict. For many years, Winnicott was the only practicing pediatrician and child psychologist. The other two major experiences which affected Winnicott's perspective and the development of his theories were his appointment as a pediatrician for Paddington Green Children's Hospital and his job as consultant psychiatrist to the Government Education Scheme in an English reception area for evacuated children during World War II. In his job as psychiatric consultant, he was responsible for supervising approximately 300 delinquent children who had been evacuated from the citie

Category: Psychology - M