Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Lollard’ 152 and refusing to join the rival ‘psychoanalytic religions’ led by Anna Freud and
Melanie Klein. Methodism developed as a reaction against the established Church of
England, promoting new thinking, personal expression of ideas and an
experiential/emotional dimension (represented symbolically by hymn singing) so in this
sense Winnicott was always a Methodist non-conformist. He promoted new thinking within
psychoanalysis by focusing on the actual experience of the mother and baby, and the nature
of the transitions that take place as a baby separates from mother to become itself.
Winnicott, like Wesley, was very enthusiastic in promoting his ideas to wider audiences,
including religious groups, not necessarily on the subject of religion as he viewed himself as
a ‘believing skeptic’ (Rudnytsky 1989: 332) with a ‘benevolent attitude towards religion …
and assertions of the existence of a transcendental God’ (Rudnytsky 1989: 333). Hoffman
locates Winnicott’s religious influences in the cultural context of the Enlightenment in
Britain that retained a moral dimension in which religion continued to play a vital part. This
she argues convincingly, had a profound impact on Winnicott’s ideas and the evolution of
interpersonal psychoanalysis (Hoffman 2004, 2008).
Winnicott, like his historic theological counterpart Wesley, did not construct a systematic
body of ideas, rather he gathered together a collection of overlapping concepts that were to
be highly influential within and without the psychoanalytic world. These concepts have
152 Quoted in Hoffman (Hoffman 2004: 776). The Lollards were a predominantly English nonconformist
religious movement in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Viewed as a sect they were declared
heretical by the Church. While they supported Wycliffe in translating the Bible into vernacular language, they
were a diverse collection of individuals with no organisation and no central beliefs - though strongly anticlerical
- scattered through England. They were precursors to the later Protestant Reformation in England.
The history of Winnicott’s comment can be found in Hoffman (Hoffman 2004). A sympathetic and insightful
account to Winnicott’s overall views on religion can be found in Ulanov (Ulanov 2001).
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