Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Winnicott had experienced a ‘good enough’ experience of religion that enabled him to allow
it a place, psychologically and philosophically. His concepts maintain a balance between
uncritical acceptance and dogmatic rejection. Winnicott allowed a potential space for
religion and spirituality to emerge in ways he could never have imagined but was central to
later forms of engagement taken up by others. 166 Winnicott’s space for potential opened up
the psyche for play, creativity, the aesthetic, being real, and the potential for I-Thou
encounter. 167
Bion and the origins of a transformational paradigm
Bion was born in India in 1897, educated in Britain, and served as an officer in the First
World War where the carnage he witnessed had an emotional impact on the rest of his
life. 168 Bion’s interests in history, philosophy, art and literature led him to study at Oxford
University and Poitiers University (France), before settling to do medicine at University
College Hospital (London), where he developed his life-long interest in psychiatry and
psychoanalysis. 169 This pattern of holding together, in his being, diverse worlds, cultures
and concepts is one that runs throughout his life and work.
166
Reeves quotes Winnicott to elaborate on this. ‘I have gradually come to an unexpected need for something
corresponding to the cultural experience but located inside instead of outside … In the previous paper I stated
that there is a need for some potential space for the location of playing and cultural experience in general ...
This potential space if it existed would be outside the line that divides the inner from the outer. I now want to
refer to a potential space that is on the inside of this line. (1976b, 200-1)’ (Reeves 2005: 448).
167
Schlauch takes up Winnicott’s concepts of being, being real, and transitional space, as well as Kohut and
being empathic, relating these to wider philosophical, religious, theological concepts (Schlauch 2006, 2007a,
2007b).
168
Bion’s recollections of this period are contained in The Long-Weekend 1897-1919: Part of a life (Bion
1982).
169
His daughter interprets the significance of this history. ‘Bion came from a Protestant missionary family,
Swiss-Calvinist of Huguenot origins on his father’s side and Anglo-Indian on his mother’s. This religious
background, combined with the fact that the family was isolated from other Europeans for extended periods,
meant that the small boy was in close contact with two very different cultures. Experiences of contrast and
oppositions, but also of mediation and love between the two worlds formed a background to, and a basis for,
Bion’s later theories’ (Bion Talamo 2005: 183). Sayers offers a different perspective, that Bion was
dismissive of religion: however at a philosophical level there were important correspondences (Sayers 2003).
70