Donald Winnicott, child and adult psychoanalyst didn’t write as a religious person, but many think that his work opened up psychoanalysis to a recognition of a spiritual dimension. Winnicott’s work – greatly influenced by his work as a paediatrician, especially with mothers and babies (he saw over 60,000!), is all about relationships: within our psyche and with one another.

Winnicott grew up in a devout Wesleyan Methodist family, converting to Anglicanism in his 20s – perhaps as a way of distinguishing himself from his father. Hugely influenced by the idea of nonconformism, this trait was repeated in his relationship with all the various factions – including the orthodox in the psychoanalytic world. He saw himself as a believing sceptic, remaining openminded about the existence of a transcendent God.

One of the main ideas that links to faith is Winnicott’s thinking about what he called ‘the transitional object’ and the ‘transitional space’. Initially when we’re babies, we have no idea of anything separate from us, gradually we begin to differentiate what Winnicott calls ‘me’ from what feels like ‘not me’ as we gradually experience ourselves as ‘other’ from the maternal person. Winnicott saw that this hypothetical space affects us physically and psychically in both our inner and outer world. He describes this as ‘the place where we live’ – an ‘intermediate zone … a potential space …’ where play and creativity can take place. William Meissner, Jesuit priest and psychoanalyst, took Winnicott’s concept of the transitional experience when he writes about faith:

‘The believer does not regard their* faith as a matter of wishful hallucination or of purely subjective implications. Rather, their faith speaks to them of the nature of the world in which they live, of the meaning and purpose of their existence there, and in most religious traditions, of the relationship of that world and themselves to a divine being who creates, loves, guides, and judges. At the same time that faith asserts, however, it cannot demonstrate the independent reality of the spiritual world and to which it lays claim. Consequently, the experience of faith is not totally subjective, nor is it totally objective. Rather, it represents a realm in which the subjective and objective interpenetrate … in which both the subjective and objective poles of experience contribute to the substance of belief.’

The experience of God is located, in Winnicott’s terms, ‘outside, inside, at the border’, where the focus of mysticism on the inner world, ‘the centre of the self’, is balanced by the outer world of infinity ‘reaching out’.

Winnicott’s concept of illusion is helpful too. A baby’s experience of an idealized mother created through the baby’s illusion of omnipotence, is gradually 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. The teddy bear, a piece of material, or a hard toy is the classic ‘transitional object’ used by the small child to deal with separation and offer a creative relationship. This renewed capacity to use illusion as a creative aspect of being finds echoes in myth, art, and religion. Winnicott thought that illusions and transitional space link to our later use of religious symbols, rituals, beliefs, and practices.

(* Am changing the quote into inclusive language).