Weaning

Weaning occupies a charged intersection in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a concrete developmental event and as a symbolic marker of the infant’s first encounter with loss, frustration, and the limits of omnipotence. Klein’s contributions are foundational: she reads weaning as the experiential epicentre of the depressive position, the moment when anxieties about the destruction of the good object come to a head and the infant must undertake a primitive form of mourning. Abraham’s earlier oral-stage schema frames weaning as a potential site of libidinal fixation, with both under-gratification and over-indulgence producing pathological adhesion to the sucking register. Winnicott complicates the picture by insisting that weaning presupposes a prior process of illusion and disillusionment; without that scaffolding, the infant cannot even arrive at a genuine weaning experience. He further illuminates how the transitional object eases the passage. Neumann, as reported by Samuels, treats weaning symbolically as the hinge between dyadic and triadic psychic organisation. Bowlby critiques Klein’s privileging of breast-loss while preserving her insight into loss as pathogenic. Schore extends the weaning metaphor into clinical technique, contrasting premature ‘releasing’ with necessary ‘holding.’ Together these voices reveal weaning as a nexus where oral drive theory, object relations, developmental neurobiology, and clinical termination all converge.

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the stage is set for the frustrations that we gather together under the word ‘weaning’; but it should be remembered that when we talk about the phenomena that cluster round weaning we are assuming the underlying process, the process by which opportunity for illusion and gradual disillusionment is provided.

Winnicott argues that weaning is only intelligible as a developmental achievement against the background of the prior illusion-disillusionment dialectic, without which the infant cannot even reach a normal weaning reaction.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis

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the termination of an analysis reactivates in the patient earlier situations of parting, and is in the nature of a weaning experience. This implies, as my work has shown me, that the emotions felt by the baby at weaning time, when early infantile conflicts come to a head, are strongly revived towards the end of an analysis.

Klein establishes weaning as the original template for all later experiences of loss and termination, including the end of analysis, thereby linking infant oral deprivation directly to transference dynamics.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis

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The question of weaning links up with the more general problem of frustration. Frustration, if not excessive, may even help the child to deal with his depressive feelings. For the very experience that frustration can be overcome tends to strengthen the ego and is part of the work of mourning.

Klein reframes weaning not merely as traumatic deprivation but as a potential ego-strengthening encounter with manageable frustration that rehearses the work of mourning.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis

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At the time of weaning some infants show less appetite, some an increased greed, while others oscillate between these two responses. Such changes occur at every step in weaning.

Klein details the phenomenological variability of weaning responses—withdrawal, greed, oscillation—as clinical indices of the infant’s underlying object-relational and depressive anxieties.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis

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these fundamental attitudes largely determine, particularly during the process of being weaned, the infant’s capacity to accept, in the full sense of the word, substitutes for the primary object.

Klein argues that the degree to which the good breast has been securely internalised governs the infant’s capacity to accept substitutes during weaning, making prior inner security the decisive variable.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting

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It frequently happens that neurotically disposed children react to the attempt at weaning by taking so little food that the mother is compelled to give in to them for the time being. In pronounced cases difficulties of this kind can continue up to school age.

Abraham documents how neurotic resistance to weaning manifests as food refusal, tracing persistent oral fixation through clinical examples of children—and even adolescents—who cannot relinquish sucking.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting

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Whether in this early period of life the child has had to go without pleasure or has been indulged with an excess of it, the effect is the same. It takes leave of the sucking stage under difficulties.

Abraham formulates the paradox that both oral deprivation and oral over-indulgence equally impede normal weaning, creating libidinal fixation at the oral stage through opposed pathways.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting

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N. suggests that weaning, taken as other than a literal event, represents the transition between these two quite different stages. If the child’s inner schedule of development is followed, weaning will not be traumatic, particularly if the mother makes up for the reduction in other bodily contact by kissing and caressing the child.

Neumann, via Samuels, reframes weaning as a symbolic developmental threshold between dyadic and triadic psychic organisation, emphasising that trauma is contingent rather than inevitable when the child’s inner timetable is respected.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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He was fed at the breast for four months and then weaned without difficulty. Y sucked his thumb in the early weeks and this again ‘made weaning easier for him than for his older brother’.

Winnicott illustrates through case observation how thumb-sucking and the subsequent adoption of a transitional object serve as developmental buffers that facilitate weaning without significant distress.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting

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the evidence for the importance of the first year and of weaning is, on scrutiny, far from impressive. The alternative elaborations which, it is claimed, the evidence favours are that the most significant object that can be lost is not the breast but the mother herself.

Bowlby critiques the Kleinian privileging of weaning and breast-loss as the paradigmatic early trauma, arguing instead that the mother as whole person, across a broader developmental window, is the more significant lost object.

Bowlby, John, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980supporting

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We must rethink our conceptions about the holding (bonding and attachment) aspects of treatment and its dialectical relationship to those interventions, such as confrontative interpretations, that bespeak ‘weaning.’

Schore extends the weaning concept into clinical technique, opposing premature analytic ‘releasing’ to developmental holding, and warning that patients with early deficits require more of the latter.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

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the group was considered a method of therapy weaning. Obviously, group therapy is not a modality to be used to facilitate the termination phase of individual therapy.

Yalom uses ‘weaning’ as a clinical metaphor for the misguided practice of transferring patients to group therapy in order to terminate individual treatment, noting its counterproductive effects.

Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008aside

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