Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

The creativity of Winnicott
Winnicott is a significant influence in the UK and the USA where his ideas offer a creativity
held alongside concepts from Fairbairn, Kohut, Rycroft, Milner and Loewald. Winnicott’s
most creative ideas adopted by the interviewees were: seeing beyond the individual to a
‘Third’ area of experience – which opens up the possibility of the spiritual 417 ; the vital place
of transitional processes and how objects are used in this; the importance of living with
paradox; and the focus on ‘being’, ‘Something that Winnicott understood, Klein did not’
(JG 1169). 418 Winnicott, alongside Fairbairn and Kohut, is seen as more open to religious
and spiritual dimensions and his transitional concepts offered creative forms of engagement.
The neglected Jung
One analyst (DB) had a prior Jungian training but despite the research focus on spirituality,
Jung was noticeably absent. Pfister retained his friendship with Freud because he ignored
Jung. This pattern was replicated in the interviews even when the interviewer introduced
Jung on occasions. ‘I read Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and I thought it was a
really fascinating book … at that age, i.e. seventeen, … Jung seemed to me to be very deep
… like a great adventure and a great romance … then I started reading Freud and Freud
was much more appealing to me than Jung … I think Jung’s a more interesting man, but I
think Freud’s a much more interesting writer’ (AP 107-123). Jones mentioned Jung as part
of the wider history of psychoanalysis, but focused more specifically on contemporary
psychoanalysis (JJ 962-963). Given limited references to Jung he could have been
417
This has some parallel but different philosophical and psychoanalytic foundations to Ogden’s ‘Analytic
Third’ (Ogden 1994, 2006).
418
‘We are object dedicated and we are tied into the object. Winnicott implied that there was the “being
infant” and the “doing infant”, the “doing” is the Kleinian infant … but there is the other infant, the one that
the environmental object facilitates and allows to grow in his own right separate from the object’ (JG 1170-
1174).
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