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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
D. W. Winnicott offers a psychological interpretation of the intermediate area of experience between subjectivity and objectivity. He includes mature cultural imagination within this area. Religious scholars have recently observed that Winnicott's theory is an improvement over the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity Freud promoted in The Future of an Illusion. However, Winnicott continues to apply Freud's term “illusion” to this intermediate area because claims to verifiability or falsifiability cannot be made on its behalf. This article maintains that Winnicott's interpretation of culture should be clarified and revised to make room for a public domain, which includes morality and religion. A pragmatic position is presented, which argues that claims to goodness or Tightness can be made on behalf of morality and claims to moral fruitfulness can be made on behalf of religion.
1 Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1975).Google Scholar I wish to thank the editorial readers of Horizons for their criticism and am indebted to them for suggesting revisions of earlier versions of this article. I also wish to thank Pamela Kilby for her help in editing this article.
2 The dichotomy between subjective illusion and objective reality found in The Future of an Illusion does not do justice to the much more nuanced position on the relationship between subjective and objective inquiry reflected in the Freudian corpus taken as a whole. A review of his work as a whole shows that Freud moved back and forth between an objective metapsychological explanation of mental forces and inter-subjective clinical interpretations of conscious and unconscious intentions and purposes. See Wallwork, Ernest, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 19–48Google Scholar, for a clear and recent review of these issues.
3 Winnicott, D. W., Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (New York: Norton, 1986), 36;Google Scholar and Winnicott, D. W., Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 3, 14, 38, 99–100.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., 13-14, 101-102.
5 See Rizzuto, Ana-Maria, The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 72–73, 177–209;Google ScholarMeissner, W. W., Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 164–84;Google ScholarMiessner, W. W., Life and Faith: Psychological Perspectives on Religious Experience (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1987) xiii–xiv, 38–44;Google ScholarMcDargh, John, Psychoanalytic Object Relations Theory and the Study of Religion: On Faith and the Imaging of God (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 122–23, 204–44;Google ScholarMcDargh, John, “The Life of the Self in Christian Spirituality and Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” Horizons 11/2 (Fall 1984): 344–60;CrossRefGoogle ScholarJones, James W., Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Religion: Transference and Transcendence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 38–46, 55–62, 133–34;Google ScholarRoss, Mary Ellen and Ross, Cheryl Lynn, “Mothers, Infants, and the Psychoanalytic Study of Ritual,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9 (1983): 26–39;CrossRefGoogle ScholarRoss, Mary Ellen, “Illusion and Reality in Freud and Winnicott: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Religion,” Soundings 73 (1990): 465–81;Google Scholar and Jonte-Pace, Diane, “Object Relations Theory, Mothering, and Religion: Toward a Feminist Psychology of Religion,” Horizons 14/2 (Fall 1987): 310–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Winnicott, , Playing and Reality, 14.Google Scholar
7 See Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar, and Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981).Google Scholar
8 This does not mean that Winnicott ignores morality altogether in his work. He helpfully describes the kind of early care required for development of a healthy sense of moral responsibility and illuminates some of the psychological hazards of moral education. See Winnicott, D. W., The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1965), 15–28, 73–82, 93–105.Google Scholar However, he ignores the need for justifiable public claims in sustaining moral life.
9 The term “moral sources” is borrowed from Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 91–107.Google Scholar
10 In “The Denial of Mystery: Object Relations Theory and Religion,” Horizons 16/2 (Fall 1989): 243–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Roy Hemdon Steinhoff Smith has also criticized Winnicott's interpretation of religion as illusion. I agree with Smith that religious thinkers have uncritically adopted Winnicott's work. However, my own reading and criticism of Winnicott differs considerably from Smith's. He maintains that Winnicott makes a moralistic judgment that illusion is “valued only as the means to the achievement and maintenance of firm boundaries between the self and object” and that Winnicott views illusion “merely as means to reality acceptance” (257). Smith offers very little support for this interpretation. He acknowledges that Winnicott views illusion as the “source of all that human beings most value” (257), but he believes that the contradiction between this emphasis and the alleged moralistic identification of maturity with reality acceptance points to the fact that Winnicott's interpretation of religion as illusion is serving a defensive function by enabling him to deny the reality of a transcendent dimension to religious Mystery.
By contrast, I do not believe that Winnicott judges religion or other forms of illusion to be valuable only as a means to reality-oriented activities. Rather, he indicates that illusion is valuable and appropriate in its own right as an area of creative and authentic expression. My quarrel with Winnicott is his assertion that we cannot make public claims on behalf of cultural creations that are not empirically verifiable. He regards the religious believer as “mad” if he attempts to make such claims. Unlike Smith, I will use a pragmatic argument to show that people can and do make public claims for morality and religion.
11 Winnicott, , Maturational Processes, 75–77.Google Scholar
12 Ibid., 33-34.
13 Ibid., 141.
14 See Winnicott's, case study illustration in Playing and Reality, 53–64.Google Scholar
15 Winnicott, , Maturational Processes, 83–92.Google Scholar
16 Winnicott, , Playing and Reality, 1–25.Google Scholar
17 Ibid., 5.
18 Winnicott, , Home, 36.Google Scholar
19 Winnicott, , Playing and Reality, 3 (italics in original).Google Scholar
20 Ibid., 2 (italics added).
21 Ibid., 13-14.
22 Winnicott, , Home, 172–73.Google Scholar
23 King, Martin Luther Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in Bellah, Robertet al., ed., Individualism and Commitment in American Life: Readings on the Themes of Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 308.Google Scholar
24 This formulation of the rules required for discursive justification was suggested Alexy, by Robert, “Eine Theorie des practischen Diskurses” in Oelmüller, Willi, ed., Normenbegrundung und Normendurchsetzung (Paderborn: Schbningh, 1978), 40–41Google Scholar, quoted in Habermas, Jürgen, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Lenhardt, Christian and Nicholsen, Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 89.Google Scholar
25 Compare Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of emotivism in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 6–13.Google Scholar
26 Stout, Jeffrey, Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon, 1988), 13–32, 220–42.Google Scholar
27 For example, Franklin Gamwell attempts to construct a theistic ethic based on the metaphysical claim that all reality incorporates unity in diversity. See Gamwell, , The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).Google Scholar
28 See, for example, Apel, Karl-Otto, Toward a Transformation of Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).Google Scholar
29 See Bernstein, Richard, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 74–75.Google Scholar
30 We need only turn to Twain's, MarkThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985)Google Scholar, chap. 31, for a wonderful fictional illustration of the impact of common experience upon the assumptions of racial prejudice. Compare Sagan's, Eli use of this illustration in Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 17–18.Google Scholar
31 See Habermas, , Moral Consciousness, 67.Google Scholar
32 This requirement of capacity for “co-feeling” goes beyond Habermas' rules for ideal discourse and is in agreement with Carol Gilligan's remarks in a chapter which she co-authored with Wiggins, Grant, “The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood Relationships” in Gilligan, Carol, Ward, Janie Victoria, and Taylor, Jill McLean, eds., Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education, (Cambridge: Center for the Study of Gender, Education and Human Development, 1988), 122–23, 132.Google Scholar I believe this additional requirement for justification is warranted in light of our postmodern experience of potential for rationalizing distortion and emotional obstacles to understanding.
33 Although, for purposes of illustration, the accuracy of this assertion is not particularly important, I am basing it on Eliade's, Mircea description of the Yuin in Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, trans. Trask, Willard R. (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 11–13.Google Scholar
34 Habermas would object to such an assumption. However, my point is to illustrate that if such an assumption is made, it does not compel Westerners to abandon commitment to justification through approximating the democratic ideal of discourse.
35 See Taylor, , Sources, 61.Google Scholar
36 See Phillips, Adam, Winnicott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 15, 99, 71;Google Scholar and Davis, Madeleine and Wallbridge, David, Boundary and Space: An Introduction to the Work of D. W. Winnicott (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1981), 6.Google Scholar
37 Phillips, , Winnicott, 111.Google Scholar
38 Winnicott, , Home, 182.Google Scholar
39 In The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar, Peter Homans has gone much further than Winnicott in explaining how we share transitional phenomena to create culture. However, his development of Winnicott's theory of culture does not address the criticism I am raising. Homans does not take issue with Winnicott's statement that public claims are not made on behalf of shared cultural creations, and he does not mention morality except insofar as it is linked to what he regards as “anti-psychological” retrievals of community in the work of Rieff, Philip, Lasch, Christopher, MacIntyre, Alasdair, and Bellah, Robert (The Ability to Mourn, 300, 307).Google Scholar The lack of a constructive role for morality in his theory of culture leads me to believe that Homans thinks that creative people in postmodern culture need not rely upon moral claims. I believe that they do continue to rely upon such claims.
40 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. with introduction by Marty, Martin M. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), 18, 374–77.Google Scholar
41 Taylor, , Sources, 92–93.Google Scholar
42 For Taylor, moral sources are also moral goods. He uses the term “good” differently than Habermas. Habermas makes a sharp distinction between procedural norms and evaluative goods, arguing that norms should be distinguished from goods because normative claims have a universal intent, whereas claims regarding values or goods do not. See Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon, 1981), 19–20, 42.Google Scholar According to Habermas, when we claim that a person ought to do something, we expect that anyone who engages in an ideal discourse could agree with us. By contrast, when we claim that something is good, we are making a weaker claim which extends only to a limited group of people who share a particular way of life.
Taylor uses the term “good” to refer to whatever objects are worthy of our love, respect, or admiration. He maintains that the fundamental procedural norms outlined by Habermas imply judgments about the objects of our moral experience, and, therefore, there is an “ontological” dimension to morality. For example, when we agree that we ought to respect the views of others in an ideal discourse, we are committed to the judgment that something about human beings (freedom, reason, creativity, or something else) is worthy of our respect (see Taylor, , Sources, 3–24, 85–88Google Scholar). While I am not entirely comfortable with Taylor's application of the term “ontological” to moral good because it traditionally refers to claims about the nature of the whole of reality rather than the more limited articulation of moral intuition which he seems to have in mind, I do agree with his argument that moral claims imply a commitment to something of merit which extends beyond subjectivity.
43 King, , “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 308.Google Scholar
44 Ibid., 313.
45 See Flew, Antony and MacIntyre, Alasdair, eds., Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press; New York: Macmillan, 1955), 96–108.Google Scholar
46 On this point, I differ with James, who believes that when considered “on the whole,” religion can be judged to be morally fruitful (see Varieties, 377).
47 See, for example, Kirkpatrick, Lee A. and Shaver, Phillip R., “Attachment Theory and Religion: Childhood Attachments, Religious Beliefs, and Conversion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29/3 (1990): 315–34;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKakar, Sudhir, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Healing Traditions (Boston: Beacon, 1982), 140–50;Google Scholar and Galanter, Marc, Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
48 Taylor, , Sources, 5–8, 57–60.Google Scholar
49 Taylor is careful to point out that we can offer accounts, for example psychological explanations, which purport to identify illusions or errors in the agent's own interpretation of his motivations, actions, or beliefs. However, such explanations, which originate from an external point of view, must ultimately be evaluated as efforts at improved self-understanding. That is, we must all eventually evaluate explanations of our motivations, actions, and beliefs from the point of view of a deliberating agent who relies upon standards identifying something worthy of respect, admiration, or compassion (see Ibid., 58).