The Piggle: confrontations with non-existence in childhood

The author interweaves pieces from D. W. Winnicott's 'The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl' with her own experiences and case material, to explore how confrontations with existence/non-existence can become terrifying realities that overwhelm the child's resources. In the pages of 'The Piggle', we can see a young child 'playing' with the unfathomable notions of beginnings and endings in the wake of the birth of a sibling, which also heralds the death of the extant mother/child relationship. In the case material these issues are explored from the perspective of an adult who had been unable to resolve them without great loss of self. In both cases, parental failures impeded the child's ability to integrate his or her experiences. The work of Matte-Blanco provides a useful terminology for understanding condensations and equivalences in the material; as affect intensifies, the rules of conventional logic recede, and sameness threatens to annihilate distinctions between good and bad, or self and other. Containing these dichotomies within the analytic setting facilitates their integration, in a movement from the fragmentation of the paranoid-schizoid position towards the reconciliation and renunciation of the depressive position.