Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

decades of his life. 157 Religion for Winnicott was an intrinsic part of human nature based
on the capacity to trust, believe, understand right and wrong, and have faith – even if that
faith were not in God, miracles or the afterlife. Winnicott was neutral towards religion,
respected the religious beliefs of others (Rodman 1987: xxvi) but could not have an
‘absolute belief in’ anything whether fundamental religion, Freud or Klein. 158
In his twenties Winnicott left the Methodist Church and became an Anglican (Rodman
1987: xiii; 2003: 54) symbolizing a break from his father and, while little is known about
this, Winnicott adopted a theologically liberal view of Christianity. He focused on human
potential and creativity, where Jesus becomes the first true psychotherapist (Rodman 1987:
3). Winnicott sought to free people from dogma and fundamentalism (biblical or
psychoanalytic) as this robbed people of their innate creativity (Rodman 2003: 276). Each
person needs to discover things for themselves, with God as an internalized source of
inspiration (Rodman 1987: 88). 159 This capacity to believe linked the person with another
through an act of faith, as Winnicott was always thinking about an other: ‘there is no such
thing as a baby (without the mother)’ (Winnicott 1958/1975: 99). 160 The notion of the
‘other’ features in most of his writing (though the term is not frequently used) and this has a
rich connection with the religious dimension of being, the ‘Object beyond Objects’ (Reiland
157
A common issue in religiously devout family backgrounds added to ‘survivor’ guilt over comrades killed in
World War I. For a detailed discussion of the life-long influence of these events on Winnicott see Reeves
(Reeves 2005).
158
Winnicott saw absolute belief as a defensive denial of the human capacity for faith (Rodman 1987: xxv, 72,
193).
159
A contemporary expression of this can be found in Buckley’s Where the waters meet. Convergence and
complementarity in therapy and theology (Buckley 2008).
160
Merleau-Ponty also emphasized being as an embodied phenomenological dialectic in a form of existential
psychoanalysis (Lanteri-Laura 2005).
67