Family and maturity: from the lap to the democracy

Abstract

The study shows that unlike Freudian psychoanalysis for which it is the Oedipus complex which establishes the triangle and the family, in Winnicott it is the existence of the family which gives rise to the Oedipal situation, if health is preserved. We then show that the existence of a family and the belonging to it only comes to the individual as a fact to be taken into account at a given moment of development, when it is already possible to establish relationships with external individuals, separated from the self. The study also points to the crucial importance that Winnicott attaches to the family as an expansion of the mother's lap, the first of the “ever-widening circles” awaiting the child throughout the maturational processes in the direction of autonomy and socialization.