Is There a Future in Disillusion? Constructionist and Deconstructionist Approaches in Psychoanalysis

In his 1953 review of John Bowlby's Maternal Care and Mental Health, Winnicott (1989) writes: “I think Bowlby has omitted reference to the change-over from a relationship to a subjective object to a relationship to an object that is objectively perceived…. This disillusionment process belongs to health, and it is not possible to refer to an infant's loss of object without referring to the stage of disillusionment, and to the positive or negative factors in the early stages of this process which depend on the capacity of the mother to give the baby the illusion without which disillusionment makes no sense” (p. 429). Although both illusioning and disillusioning, constructionist and deconstructionist,** elements are necessary in any optimally functioning analytic therapy, in contemporary psychoanalysis we may have become so focused on the responsibility that we, like mothers, have to provide illusion, that we are in danger of forgetting that we also share her responsibility to disillusion for, as Winnicott (1989) reminds us: “In terms of the earlier stages of the individual's integration… the mother (in particular) plays her role as the one who disillusions her infant” (p. 145).