ilkel duygusal gelişim*

Winnicott, in his paper of Primitive Emotional Development , makes clear that primitive types of relationship result as a flight from the difficulties arising out of the developmental stages as the child grows. He recommends a student analyst to learn first to cope with ambivalence and then with depressive relationships and then with primitive pre-depressive relationships and their related defenses to prevent any harm and loss of time. He specifies three processes which seem to start very early; integration, personalization and realization through the appreciation of time, space and other properties of reality. Delay or failure in respect of each predisposes to disintegration, depersonalization, and dissociation and to the loss of reality adaptation. Winnicott illustrates a “good enough” caregiver and the results of her shortcomings and the functions of dreams, illusions, fantasy world and external reality. He then describes an early ruthless relationship between a baby and his mother. The mother has to tolerate this ruthless self to avoid the development of a false self. Primitive retaliation is a still more primitive object relationship described where the environment is part of the self. Thumb-sucking, having both primitive and sophisticated meanings, is illustrated as an application of the ideas presented.