‘Here Quietude is Linked with Stillness’: Winnicott's Silent Core of the Self and Aesthetic Experience

In his paper ‘Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of certain opposites’ (1963), Donald Winnicott suggests that there is a silent, non-communicating area of experience at the core of the self. Poetic expression takes a prominent role in the text. In this article, I concentrate on the aesthetic dimension of Winnicott's text and use it to explore the role of aesthetic experience in the development of self-experience. I suggest that the paper's aesthetic dimension—form, quality and structure—expresses essential characteristics of the core of the self and the mature self's communication with it. I furthermore suggest that Winnicott, by use of poetic expression, offers the idea that the core, defined here as pre-reflective experience, can be approached through aesthetic means. Building on George Hagman and Giuseppe Civitarese, I argue that aesthetic experience creates a bridge between pre-reflective and reflective aspects of self-experience and thus contributes to the integration of self. I suggest that forming a connection with the core can be seen as an aesthetic act where the intention is not to transform pre-reflective experience into reflective. Since aesthetic experience includes reflection, the effort to represent the core of the self remains paradoxical.