Winnicott, Space, and a Good-enough Church

In Winnicott’s model, there is the child, a subject and the external reality, the object. In between the subject and the object, there is the mother who helps a child in making the transition from subjectivity to objectivity. He calls this, transitional object. The child’s ability to relate to the external reality depends on this transitional object. What is the function of this transitional object? Transition.

When a child cries of hunger, a mother presents her breast. This gives the illusion to the child that he/she is omnipotent. “I think breast and breast exists.” Winnicott believes that the mother’s ability to meet this need offers a child with a basic sense of security. But illusion is not reality. The mother must help the child makes this transition. A good-enough-mother makes possible this transition. She does not jump to fulfill every wish and fantasy of the child and hence a child learns that there is an external object outside of him. Not every thing he wishes comes into being. He realizes that he cannot think breast into existence. However a good-enough-mother also teaches the child that although the security does not come from the ability to create an object that will fulfill wishes, the object external to him or her will still provide that sense of security. Winnicott suggests that when a child plays by herself she know that even though the mother does not fulfill every wish, the mother is always present, keeping an eye on her. In this space, a child sense of security is internalized.

Translating this into theological terms, we are looking at believers making a transition from subjectivity to objectivity, from subjective experience to objective truth, from illusion to reality. Transitional object plays an essential role in this process of transition. I would like to propose that perhaps the role of the church is not one of the guardian of truth but a mid-wife, a transitional object. The church is not the objective object, but a transitional object that aids in the transitional process. I believe that the church cannot make pilgrimage for believers. And hence for those believers who find that most of the fundamental beliefs do not make sense to their existential struggle, they must make their own journeys. The church can create that space within the church and helps in the transition by becoming a good-enough-church.

Space opens up the possibility of exploration. In the struggle to know, the passion to learn and the quest for truth, a person is able to move; to think, to read, to deconstruct, to reconstruct, to doubt, to question, to cry and laugh. When everything is in place and the way is clearly defined, one can only move either forward or backward. One can become claustrophobic, theologically.

Perhaps this is what the church is about. Perhaps this is where one becomes a believer. Because the church has created a space, a space where believers can struggle, question, doubt, debate, serve, cherish; a church where they can get angry and argumentative; a church where they can laugh and smile. A church they are frustrated with and a church they truly love. Knowledge and rationality only affect the mind. Struggles, doubt, fear, uncertainty, questions, validation, affirmation, affect one’s being. Certainty, like Wittgenstein has indicated, is much nearer then we think. It is who they are. Hence in this existential exploration, the quest for truth, they have come to know within their being, that there is a place they can always return to and find rest for the weary soul. In Finding Space: Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality, Ann Ulanov has so beautifully articulated the sacredness of space.

We destroy our projected object. But then, the object itself still stands there before us, existing in its own right, external to our creation of it and our projections upon it, surviving out of its own resilience and power. As Winnicott puts it: “The subject says to the object,’ I destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says, ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’” Now we confront the object as other to us, as one who may bring to us real resources out of its own reality, one that may differ from and exceed the resources we ascribe to it in fantasy.

A good-enough-church provides space for believers to search, question, doubt, and even attack. Her survival of this intense quest for truth makes possible the transition, the reduction of projective tendency. “The mother survives our destroying our picture of her,” writes Ulanov. “She rebounds out of herself and her own resources, not because the child withholds his ruthless instinct. For there she stands, external, real, with him.”

On the other hand, a church that cannot survive believers’ ruthless instinct traps believers within their own projective tendency, thus inhibiting the transitional process. I would like to propose that the church that sees itself as the final object to be reach only intensifies subjective projection and hence in her desire to offer truth to believers, she ends up trapping them in their illusion.

The church that sees itself as a good-enough-church, as a transitional object increases the possibility for truth and, in the process, makes truth more affective, more existential. The truth that affects the very being of believers.