The Distended Tear

“I wish to make an examination of the capacity of the individual to be alone, acting on the assumption that this capacity is one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development . . . Although many types of experience go to the establishment of the capacity to be alone, there is one that is basic, and without a sufficiency of it the capacity to be alone does not come about; this experience is that of being alone, as an infant and small child, in the presence of mother. . . . it is perhaps fair to say that after satisfactory intercourse each partner is alone and contented to be alone. Being able to enjoy being alone along with another person who is also alone is in itself an experience of health.”

-D. W. Winnicott

                In this paper I have introduced a modification of Freud’s conception of the instincts, in doing so I

have made room for my notion of a drive for connection. Furthermore, I argue that for the human being

connection is multifaceted, embodying all efforts to escape aloneness, an aloneness not represented by 

Winnicott’s aloneness in the presence of another.  This notion is drawn from the first relationship, the

maternal  - child relationship. Winnicott draws our attention to the supportive ego of the mother as the

decisive factor in the child’s ego emergence.  In the process of becoming, it is the supportive ego of the

mother that serves to protect the “going on being” process from excessive external impingement or

interference. The ego of the mother supplements and supports the immature and undeveloped ego of the

child, for the child’s ego is unable to effectively mediate between the inner needs and the array of stimuli

from the outer world.

                In the mother and child bond, the mother attunes herself to the child in a manner that Winnicott terms “primary maternal preoccupation”. This attunement is by way of emotional communication, as the child is preverbal. No matter what language a child may later come to speak, the universal dynamic of the first relationship (template) is the emotional communication of feeling states.  The child’s basic need for survival can only be met in the presence of another. My training analysis has enabled me to explore this in the unfolding transference with my analyst. This foundation of preverbal communication with the caregiver gives the impetus to our need for connection in our subsequent relations. Further, I argue that maturation witnesses a metamorphosis of this need but that the essence of this need never leaves us. It is here that we find the source of incompleteness in the shallow social relationship. We each desire to be heard; however, if we can not be heard at this base level then we are alone, but not in the presence of another. If in the interaction of temporal space we can not “feel” one another, then we go unmet. In this state there is no “real external object”, only conscious and unconscious memories of the initial object world; unfulfilled and unmet the psyche hungers and it seeks refuge in the unconscious memory.

What is there for the woman or man who finds the self locked within the body deprived of all sensory experience? What happens to the one who can neither touch nor be touched by the external?

How do we make sense of Winnicott’s “going on being” in the absen