Winnicott's Concept of Innate Morality and the Development of the Capacity for Concern

The child is sitting on the potty looking at her father and getting the message from her father to please him by using the potty. She does what he asks. She is 10 months old so this is impossible to do, neurophysiologically speaking. The achievement of continence is recorded in her baby book and is discovered many years later when she is in analysis. The first tantrum is also recorded. It too happened at 10 months.

Winnicott asks how much the moral code is taught and how much it is innate. He delineates two schools of thought: “At the extremes they are irreconcilable, (a) We cannot risk it. We must plant a moral code in the virgin soil and do so before the child is old enough to resist … (b) The only morality that counts is what comes from the individual … It is better to wait and wait, till by natural processes each child comes to have a sense of right and wrong that is personal” (1984, pp. 106-107). His idea is that morality is innate, and he shows why this understanding is crucial for those whose role it is to facilitate the emergence of a human being.

One of Winnicott's earliest presentations about this was in a bbc radio broadcast in 1949, “The Innate Morality of the Baby” (1964, pp. 93-97). I will try to do justice to this excellent paper with a pérecis. The baby hates to waste an experience and much prefers to wait and bear frustration of primitive pleasures, if waiting adds the warmth of personal relationship. The mother helps provide the framework of a loving relationship for the infant's feelings of activity and violence. The early instinctual aggressiveness,