Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

theory includes developmental, transitional and creative aspects underpinned by a reality
that is knowable. 148 A neglected aspect of Winnicott is how his writing communicates with
other disciplines in a way that people instinctively connect with (Grolnick, Barkin, and
Muensterberger 1978) and his speaking, captured in his radio broadcasts, demonstrates an
ability to communicate complex ideas in a way readily understood by a popular audience. 149
Winnicott went on to posit a dimension of psychological functioning that is ‘sacred’
(Winnicott 1971: 103) and Gargiulo concludes Winnicott ‘was essentially a profoundly
spiritual man’ (Gargiulo 1998: 154). 150 How this came about requires an examination of
Winnicott’s life and thought.
Winnicott and religion
Donald Winnicott grew up in a devout Wesleyan Methodist family and although he never
embraced Christianity as a personal faith 151 (despite ‘conversion’ to the Anglican Church in
his twenties), he was influenced by nonconformist religion declaring himself ‘a natural
148
‘Winnicott stands in the philosophical tradition that presumes that human beings make contact and interact
with the objective communal world: that is, what we are capable of knowing is reality itself, that which stands
in the shadow of interpersonal phantasy, so to speak, but which is knowable as objective. Such reality is
usually encountered, developmentally, in the mothering person, the mother as existing in the outside world …
Object relations, as applicable to Winnicott, is not a special brand of intra-psychic discourse (not a descriptive
term for internal images), but rather an obvious statement about man’s essential communal makeup. Our
“selves” are formed by everything that comes to pass between us, everything that constitutes our personal
and/or social history. Human beings, consequently, do not have relationships; they are relationships. No
meaningful analytic work can be done without that awareness’ (Gargiulo 1998: 142f.).
149
Some of Winnicott’s earliest publications were on these radio talks, published in two books in 1957, then
combined in 1967 (Winnicott 1967).
150
Winnicott ‘was not interested, however, in polemics about religion. Anyone familiar with Zen thought or
Vedantic Hinduism, will hear echoes while reading him; particularly, for example, in his understanding of the
role of breathing in establishing a personal soma’ although ‘he was not an advocate for missionaries of any
sort – religious, political, or psychoanalytic’ (Gargiulo 1998:154). Gargiulo also writes about aloneness
drawing on Winnicott. ‘That alone space has to be visited, figuratively speaking, in order to grasp any
meaningful relationship between spirituality and psychoanalysis. The capacity to be alone, in the presence pf
the other, is, as we know, basic to feeling alive as well as experiencing the world as emotionally significant’
(Gargiulo 2004b).
151
Rodman quotes Winnicott writing briefly about his experience of evangelical religion at public school
(Rodman 2003: 73).
63