I Must Not Smother: On Holding And Containing, Part Two

Daniel dashed my romantic thinking around holding. I’d grown to consider it as benevolent, reassuring, calming. He made me realise that when you spend too long with only one side of the story, you lose perspective. 

This is the second tale of mothering, the one that arrives after Bion’s containing. For the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), ‘The main thing is the physical holding’ (1960a: 595) which he describes as:

a form of loving. It is perhaps the only way a mother can show the infant her love of it. There are those who can hold an infant and those who cannot; the latter quickly produce in the infant a sense of insecurity. (Ibid: 592)

Winnicott’s holding begins in utero at the point of conception (Ibid: 594) and is characterised by maternal empathy, reliability, physical holding, meeting physiological needs and protecting the child from ‘physiological insult’, such as falling (Ibid: 592). This phenomenon extends beyond the maternal space to incorporate what he describes as ‘the total environment’ (Ibid: 590) and into the professional therapeutic setting, which the writer and therapist, Adam Phillips, interprets as ‘a holding environment analogous to maternal care’ (Phillips, 2007: 11).[1]

There are lots of things wrong with Winnicott. I don’t have the time for them here, just that, well, we all have responsibility for holding, for getting that right. But I do want to think about the possibility of holding in the most perfect sense. 

I meet an old friend out walking with her son, our friendship reaches back over twenty years, to when he joined nursery with my son. There are warm smiles, cheery exclamations of delight at coming across each other, but no physical contact. Instead, she performs an all too familiar gesture that is as much felt at my flesh as witnessed in sight. She wraps her arms across her chest, each hand resting on the opposite shoulder, and wriggles her torso, I laugh, bring the palms of my hands to meet at my chest and bow my head, ‘namaste’.  It’s all quite comic, but also very touching. I suspect it means more because we cannot hug, because this performance is more thought through, thought about, than an instinctive hug, because that is ‘impermissible’, we have to find some other way of demonstrating our feelings. This strange dance touches me because it is funny, we are like children in our greeting game, but it is not so ridiculous, like the shoe tapping, that move that erases the gravity of where we are at. What makes this orthopaedic caress work, makes it more than a gesture, is that I do know what it feels like to be held by her, I have embodied our physical and emotional connectedness. Winnicott and Bion – and others besides – knew the long term value of the memory of being well held.

Over and over I stitched the mantra ‘I must not smother’ into a pillow case. I began as my daughter was about to leave home and things ‘at home’ were a little tricky. It was meant, I think, as an observation that I might clinging – that edge to holding that resists letting go. Clinging, a plastic, airless quality; cling film. I remember when this curious material came into being, its drum skin tightness stretched across bowls of trifle, wrapped around lumps of cheese, rendering them sweaty and unappealing to sight and taste. Even then, years ago, I found clingfilm appallingly abject, like suffocating slime.

‘I must not smother’ is slimy – that barely there but problematic slip between mother and smother – it’s quite tricky to stitch that over and over again, increasingly aware of trying to let go whilst simultaneously resisting. I never finished it – probably managed a third of its width – and now wonder if doing it helped me process the emotions, that it might have been cathartic or sublimating in the Freudian sense. Its time does feel over, I’m not even sure where it might be, but it does bring me to something darker. What happens when we hold too keenly? 

I’d been cheerily discussing holding with my friend Daniel, eagerly referencing Winnicott, talking of love and anticipating he might share my thinking, when he offered a different turn. The holding that is about restraint. Of being held down, against one’s will, of a holding that reaches back to the straight jacket of the asylum. It stalled me. Recent history testifies to the brutality of restraint, of being held down, it is, as we all know, nothing new. This is so far from the holding I had in mind when I started this thinking and it does not feel right to unpick it here, but it has pricked my bubble, pricked my thinking. I’ve not yet touched on the harm caused by other examples of what I think of as misholding, memories that can be held in both body and mind for decades.

After more than three months at home, my daughter returned to London. She stood on the step below me, her head buried between my breasts and we hugged. I stroked her wild hair, teased apart her curls, told her how lucky it felt to have had her at home, how much I had enjoyed her company, that I loved her. It came as a huge surprise – and I’m not sure why I should be surprised – that it was she who started sobbing, that it was she and not me that resisted letting go. Perhaps it might be that I am grown out of my clingy phase, that I’ve reached a point of balance between holding on and letting go.

For now I am porous. Like a well knitted garment, I stretch, open up, extend, accommodate and return to myself. For now.

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[1] Winnicott believed that a mother must herself enjoy ‘good-enough maternal care’ if she is to succeed in holding. ‘It should be noted that mothers who have it in them to provide good enough care can be enabled to do better by being cared for themselves in a way that acknowledges the essential nature of their task. Mothers who do not have it in them to provide good enough care cannot be made good enough by mere instruction’ (Winnicott, 1960: 594).

Phillips, A. (2007). Winnicott (London: Penguin).

Winnicott, D.W. (1960). ‘The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41: 585–95.