Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

made a lovely missionary’ (quoted in Rodman 2003: 91) did come true though the mission
field was the inner world of the psyche.
Winnicott’s expression of ‘being’ can be seen in his moving poem The Tree (1963) regarded
as profoundly autobiographical (Rodman 2003: 284). It can also be understood
psychoanalytically. Winnicott needed to meet his mother’s needs and resurrect her from her
depression leading to his life-long desire to resurrect the baby caught in maternal failure.
While Winnicott wished to distance himself from messiahs, psychoanalytic and religious,
(Rudnytsky 2005: 419) 163 he was fascinated with Jesus as a symbol of suffering, healing
and resurrection. 164 Winnicott also alluded to an inner transforming experience of
connection to others beyond the self. Recollecting those who died in World War I,
Winnicott writes ‘my being alive is a facet of some one thing of which their deaths can be
seen as other facets: some huge crystal, a body with integrity and shape intrinsical in it’
(Quoted in Reeves 2005: 427). Winnicott speaks of a life and death struggle of ‘being
alive’ and belonging to something beyond that contains an
eternal dimension. 165
Winnicott was once described as a ‘twirling firework that throws sparks in all directions,
this captures his dazzling play of thought, fantasy, and speculation, his capacity to envision
what no one had previously seen’ (Rodman 2003: 10). However this fails to capture the
unconscious dimension of Winnicott’s religious and spiritual background (examined earlier
in this section) that so resonated with later writers. Unlike so many analytic predecessors
163 ‘Archetypal roles and scenarios (hero, messiah, scapegoat, etc.) with which the infant/child feels compelled
to comply … is the development of what Winnicott (1960) called the false self’ (Grotstein 1994: 586 ).
164 Hoffman identifies key Gospel texts that link each stanza to the ministry of Jesus (Hoffman 2004).
165 Winnicott was ‘hinting at a new “realization” still only dimly perceived … an over-insistence on the
personal and private nature of integrity can blind one to an equally important aspect of human existence,
namely one’s attachment to, involvement in, a commonweal of being’ (Reeves 2005: 452).
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