The Capacity to be Alone

In this section authors have written about the Winnicottian concept that they value most in their everyday working lives. This provides a valuable insight into the ways in which Winnicott's work is being used as a springboard for new ideas, as well as enlightening familiar ground. It is striking to see how the original Winnicottian idea takes on new form as it is taken up by new generations of clinicians. Despite the absence of a Winnicottian training school, his pervasive impact continues to influence current theory and practice.

In Donald Winnicott's paper ‘On the capacity to be alone’, published in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (; Hogarth Press, 1969), he wrote of the capacity to be alone as an important sign of maturity in emotional development, and proposed that in an analytic treatment there would be times when this ability would be important to the patient. He described the capacity to be alone as originating in the experience of a little one who is able to be alone in the presence of another: for instance, a child who can play, or dream, absorbedly, near mother, or in a place or situation that represents her care, without constant reference to her or the need for interaction. As is well known, Winnicott disagreed with Melanie Klein's view that a relatively mature ego exists from early on, and postulated that early ego-development was necessary before the ‘positions’ she described could occur. He used the term ego-relatedness to describe the phase of being alone in the presence of another, referring to a stage of development in relatedness when the immature infantile ego can be supported by the maternal ego. Only with further maturation is this followed by the introjection of the ego-supportive mother, and the individual then becomes increasingly able to be alone. In one patient the silences in her sessions carried echoes of this stage of development.