Winnicott working with children playing

Both Winnicott and Merton wrote about the true self and the contrast with the false self. There are clear similarities, as both were interested in how we discover our true identity –Merton saw this as sanctity and Winnicott as health. The search was similar but the context different: Merton was writing as a religious based in a monastery, Winnicott as an analyst in the clinic and consulting room.

Merton thought that the essential aspect of the spiritual journey was the search for our true or real self. Eight years into his monastic journey he wrote:

‘For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore, the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.’

For Winnicott, the true self involves a sense of personal aliveness that includes an awareness of being or feeling real and genuine wholeness. This means a lived recognition of being the self that one is, and that this felt presence is one’s true being. ‘Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.’ Ultimately Winnicott defined this self as ‘always personal, isolated and unaffected by experience.’

For Merton the true self is ultimately ‘my own subjectivity united to the subjectivity of God … When we know God, we know ourselves, when we know ourselves, we know God.’ Merton’s emphasis is that at depth the True Self is united with God.

For Winnicott the false self often served as a self-protective defence, and so helped the true self to stay safe. He explains that initially the mother identifies with the baby, and from this repeated recognition there is security – what he calls ‘the spontaneous gesture’ then emerges which is the true self in action. However, if the mothering person is not good-enough and fails to response to the gesture and instead substituting her own, the baby will instead of responding spontaneously react with compliance – it is this compliance that is the start of the false self existence. In one paper he describes an actress patient whose ‘nothingness at the centre’ is a representation of her true self: empty, hungry and waiting.

For Merton the false self lacks substantiality – it’s not false in the moral sense, but rather lacks any fullness of being – here quite like Winnicott’s lack of being and feeling ‘real’. Merton goes deeper though seeing that the false self is our impermanent self – not enduring. ‘…it is nothing but an evanescent shadow. Its biography and its existence both end together at death.’ The false self has a history but its joys and fears are mostly superficial – at a very limited level of reality. In later writings Merton thought this false self, whilst exterior, also included unconsciousness. He thought one of life’s most pressing tasks was to unmask this false, illusory self and become ‘aware of the presence within us of a disturbing stranger, the self that is both “I” and someone else.’

Both Winnicott and Merton saw that the way to move out of and beyond the false self was through a form of rebirth. For Merton this was through prayer and contemplation. Merton believed this involved:

‘a deepening of the new life, a continuous rebirth, in which the exterior and superficial life of the ego-self is discarded like an old snake skin and the mysterious, invisible self of the Spirit becomes more present and active.’

Through this rebirth we become ourselves: the true self that God willed us to be.

For Winnicott the emergence of the true self from the care-taking false self could happen when the person was able to open to their creativity – Winnicott called it ‘playing’. In the therapeutic setting the true self of the person could ‘be’ and be ‘found’. Loosening the compliance and strictures of the false self the person opens to experiential existence, and to the chance of a new beginning.