Failure of the Holding Relationship: Some Effects of Physical Rejection on the Child's Attachment and on His Inner Experience

Bowlby's immense contribution to our awareness of the importance of holding in the early mother-child relationship was acknowledged by Winnicott in his last public lecture (1970). “John Bowlby has done more than one man's share of drawing the world's attention to the sacredness of the early holding situation and the extreme difficulties that belong to the work of those that try to mend it.”

In this paper I shall participate in Bowlby's work of drawing attention to the early holding situation, in order to consider some implications for the child psychotherapist in trying both to understand and to mend it.

Winnicott's term, “the holding situation”, was used by him to cover many aspects of the early mother-child relationship besides the actual physical holding of the baby. But here I intend to restrict myself to that aspect alone: that is, to the mother's provision of physical holding and body contact for her young child. I intend to illustrate its significance by reference to the response of children whose mothers, though present, are physically rejecting of their infants. I shall bring together contributions from attachment research and clinical work, and finally consider some implications for psychotherapy.

The role of holding in the early mother-child relationship was never developed as a theme by Freud. Winnicott pointed out that Freud himself had enjoyed good enough mothering to be able to take many aspects of its reliability for granted and to provide them for his patients in the secure and comfortable setting of his consulting room. Winnicott set out to remedy Freud's omission of the theme of holding; he developed original ideas about the role of holding in the mother-infant relationship and its parallels in the analytic situation. In 1952 he wrote that “the earliest anxiety is related to being insecurely held”, and followed this with the statement that the physical holding of the infant is a form of loving (1960a). “It is perhaps the only way in which