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Every infant who is brought into Winnicott's clinic is put into the same 'set situation': he is kept on the mother's lap, while the physician sits opposite. There is a shining spatula on the table which arouses the infant's attention. Normal infants from five to thirteen months show typical behavior in this situation. Though they are immediately interested in the shining spatula, there is first a 'period of hesitation', during which the child remains immobile. Then he takes the spatula and puts it into his mouth. In a third period he plays 'hide and seek' with it, drops it, takes it up again, drops it once more, and so on.
Deviations from this typical behavior, Winnicott says, are indications of disturbances. The period of hesitation may be overlong or may be missing. An infant of seven months with asthma, for example, reacted with spells during an overlong hesitation period. Lengthened hesitation is a sign of anxiety. But even the normal hesitation is called by Winnicott a 'superego phenomenon'. The hesitating infant, he thinks, obviously is afraid that taking the spatula might make the mother angry.
Winnicott is of the opinion that one may assume that the infant has (oral sadistic) fantasies of which he is afraid, analogous to those fantasies which children of two to five years can put into words. 'These fantasies of the infant are concerned not only with the external environment, but also with the fate and interrelationship of the people and bits of people that are being fantastically taken into him.' Winnicott assumes, with Melanie Klein, that infants who are only a few months old not only have fantasies of this kind but experience their introjected objects as 'good' or 'bad' respectively, according to the relative strength of their own sadism. It has to be added that these daring hypotheses are not justified by the observational data submitted by Winnicott. In fact Winnicott goes further and even tries to guess the concrete 'content' of the fantasi