On Ducks, Sky Diving, and Winnicott

I have been thinking lately about wood ducks, leaps of faith and psychotherapy. Wood ducks nest high up in trees, often in hollowed-out, rotted cavities or special boxes created for this purpose. This strategy keeps their eggs relatively safe from predators. But upon hatching, the baby ducklings have a problem. A nest is often a good 50 feet above the ground. Once hatched, ducklings need food, and food is in the water. Baby ducks can’t fly.

What to do? In my work as a museum tour guide, the wood duck diorama was my favorite. I would ask the children their thoughts about the little ducklings’ dilemma. Perhaps the mother helped. This was a popular suggestion, mother duck as a kind of flying carpet ride. But no. So, I would introduce the idea of cartilage, and we would wiggle our noses and think about basketballs bouncing. And someone would make the connection. The ducklings bounce! Their bones haven’t developed just yet. We would pretend to be little ducks, jumping off a bench, bouncing around, surviving our fall. Hitting the ground was no longer a catastrophe. It was rather joyous, with smiles and giggles.

The children were right: The mother did help. Mother wood ducks start calling to their babies a few days before they hatch.¹ It is a kind of auditory imprinting. The embryonic ducklings begin to recognize their mother’s voice. When it is time to leave the nest, she calls to them again from the ground. This maternal call is the impetus for the jump.

This is more than a charming story. We humans do something similar, both concretely and more emotionally. And there are real implications for therapy. But before we get there, let’s explore the jump a bit further.

There have been psychology experiments on infants and what is called “the visual cliff.” The cliff was an apparent drop-off in the middle of a table. Some of these experiments tested infants’ capacity for depth perception. In other words, researchers wanted to know if an infant would crawl across an imaginary hole in the ground, or if their eyes were developed enough to know to avoid it. Later, however, there were experiments testing babies’ willingness to cross this cliff – their version of the ducklings’ leap of faith – in response to maternal encouragement. Some tested the mother’s facial expressions. Then, a 2004 study showed that babies will cross an imaginary cliff or gap in response to a maternal call.² Not their name, per se, but something encouraging. “You’ve got this. Here I am.”

I noticed this many years ago as a lifeguard. One of the rewards for our little swimmers, after their lessons were done, was a jump off the diving board. The “deep end” was an exciting but intimidating place. A cliff of a different kind. We lifeguards were there, waiting, supported by a life buoy, ready to catch the children. Our expectant smiles and calls of encouragement were usually the anodyne to children’s anxieties about sinking, falling or drowning. The children made enthusiastic leaps, implicitly trusting that we would catch them.

But what of the child, or baby, or adult, who is afraid to jump? To trust? To take a leap of faith? To believe in the safety of relationships? What has gone wrong?

These are therapeutic questions, and this is where Winnicott can be helpful. His seminal paper “Fear of Breakdown” describes, in part, the curious situation wherein the adult is afraid of something that has already happened. At first glance, this idea seems quite strange, although we do reference it enough in popular culture. “That shoe dropped a long time ago” is Winnicottian through and through. So is the idea of bracing for disappointment.

“Fear of Breakdown” is a deceptively simple yet dense paper with a multitude of insights and ideas. To describe these would be beyond the scope of this essay. To stay with the wood ducks and the jumping, I will focus briefly on two ideas as I understand them. The idea of breakdown itself, and what it might mean to fall.

Winnicott initially describes “breakdown” as a failure of defense against early infantile agony. He clarifies that “agony” is more accurate than “anxiety.” Later, he notes that “annihilation” is more accurate than “fear of death.”³ The terms are important in their emphasis on the utter terror of what he is describing. Agony and annihilation are not idle worries. They are felt experiences that haunt our darkest dreams, that populate our horror movies. They show up in our macabre jokes. A breakdown, for Winnicott, means contact with something horrific.

One of these early agonies is falling forever.

Now, I am not arguing that wood ducks imagine some kind of nightmare world in which they never hit the ground. This would certainly be a horror movie (albeit a rather surrealist one). Winnicott, as I understand it, is talking about the lack of solid ground that can happen when there is not a sense, internally, of a reliable mother. The children at the museum intuited this, in their conviction that a mother duck could literally carry a duckling on her back, landing it safely on the forest floor.

This is the macabre joke in the converse: “You don’t need a parachute to go skydiving. You only need a parachute to go skydiving twice.”

I suspect the babies who crossed the visual cliff and the children who jumped into the deep end had an internalized sense of safety that allowed them to gently land, not crash or feel like a star flung out of orbit. And moreover, that this safety was not only the words of loving encouragement – “you can do it!” – but also the words’ echo against what was already present on the inside. Even the wood ducks had a mother calling to them while still in their embryonic “womb.” Something is inside, and when that something isn’t there, jumping to the ground can feel like a headfirst dive into an endless black hole.

This brings us back to the word “breakdown.” Ogden, in his reading of this paper, states, “To my mind, the term ‘breakdown’ refers to the breakdown of the mother–infant tie, which leaves the infant alone and raw, and on the verge of not existing.”⁴ He goes on to write, “Omnipotence, in this context, refers to an internalization of early experience with a mother….”⁴ Ogden, as I read him, is also referencing the something that isn’t there, that has broken down, and it is the umbilical cord of the mother-in-the-inside.

To return to “Fear of Breakdown” and its implications. Winnicott suggests that some or even many of us have had a breakdown, the kind of breakdown that happens early in life, before we are aware enough to experience it. Something happened relationally and it felt like agony. I don’t necessarily mean trauma in its colloquial sense of abuse or sadistic neglect. But something. And when these somethings happen too early in life, we don’t yet have a mind to process them. Instead, we place the fear into the future, where it might someday be managed. “What if tomorrow such and such happens” is a more knowable location than “once upon a time before I existed such and such happened.”

Back to our ducks. Wood ducks are born precocious. Unlike, say, robins, they can do nearly all of their little duck tasks within hours: swim, eat, walk. Their wood duck brains are ready to go. It just takes them a bit to develop their wings. Humans are very different. To quote neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, “…little human brains are born under construction. They don’t take on their full adult structure and function until they finish their principal wiring, a process that takes about twenty-five years.”⁵ And Winnicott is very specifically talking about infancy, the time where we are so dependent on the other that we don’t yet exist as a self. When a breakdown happens before there is a self, there is, in a sense, no place to put it. It is not “unconscious” in the Freudian sense of being buried somewhere (or hiding in a rotted tree, out of sight). It doesn’t yet belong to the self.

Psychoanalytic therapy and analysis proper are places for the breakdown to emerge and for the self to exist. For the agony to become safe enough to tolerate in a safe enough environment. Not through simple encouragement. Encouragement can help when there is something internal to echo against. Through the development of a relationship where we re-experience the past as present, alive in the room, with a therapist who will function as something close to that maternal voice that reaches something deep, internal, embryonic.