Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

eyond the moon to the stars and to the beginning and end of time, time that has neither an
end nor a beginning’ (Winnicott 1971: 105). 154
Secondly, Winnicott’s concept of illusion. A baby’s experience is of an idealized mother
created through their illusion of omnipotence, being replaced through disillusionment by a
good-enough mother. This leads to a capacity in the baby to be alone, both in the presence
and absence of a mother, and thus able to create and play. This renewed capacity to use
illusion as a creative aspect of being finds echoes in myth, art and religion. Access to this
early mother-baby experience can be found through the experience of psychoanalysis and
also through the ontological transitions revealed in mythic and religious symbols (Almansi
1983), rituals, beliefs and practices (Jacobs 2000). When this process fails, the baby
experiences intolerable anxiety and evolves a false self to protect the inner core of being that
Winnicott called the ‘true self’. 155 Recovery of the ‘true self’ with a capacity to create and
play through use of illusion was vitally important for Winnicott and these ideas have been
taken further by Bollas. 156
Thirdly, Winnicott added the capacity to believe. His father, a distant figure in Winnicott’s
upbringing, encouraged him to believe for himself on the basis of having read the Bible.
Although biblically literate, Winnicott found his vocation through reading Darwin and the
later experience of psychoanalysis that dealt with the guilt that plagued him for the first two
154
Winnicott adopts the language of the mystic focusing on the inner world, which is a route to the beyond,
beyond words and time.
155
Eigen describes this. ‘The true self feeling involves a sense of all-out personal aliveness … it includes an
awareness of being or feeling real. It thus requires a lived recognition of being the self one is, that this felt
presence is one’s true being. This connects with Bion’s insistence that truth is necessary for wholeness and
emotional growth’ (Eigen 1993: 128).
156
Bollas views connecting the true self as a vital therapeutic task as the true self ‘may be frozen at a time
when self experience was traumatically arrested’ (Bollas 1987: 112).
66