Festival, Communion and Mutuality

The Words ‘communion’, ‘community’ and ‘communication’ are iterrelated in ways that tell us something important about the nature and purpose of feasts and feasting. Communion is a celebration of community —of participation in a social group whose members communicate with one another by means of shared images, words, and concepts. But ‘communion’ can also name a mode of emotional interaction that is largely preverbal or sub-verbal in character, and such interaction, too, is communication. The chief characteristic of this second kind of communion—and communication—is mutuality. This mutuality is both presupposed and fostered by the giving and taking essential to festival.

Some striking comments by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott about the relations between mother and infant bear directly and importantly on this non-verbal and emotional communion.

There are moments in which the infant is appreciatively aware of its own security. Such moments, according to Winnicott, ‘have no climax. This’, he observes, ‘distinguishes them from phenomena that have instinctual backing, where the orgiastic element plays an important part and where satisfactions are closely linked with climax’. He criticises psychoanalysts for neglecting ‘the tremendous intensity of these non-climactic experiences of relating to objects’ (WINNICOTT 17). And in the original version of the paper from which I have quoted he is said to have denied strongly that ‘the most intense experiences belong to instinctual and orgiastic events’, since such a view ‘leaves out of account the function of the ego-organisation. Only if someone is there adding up personal experience into a total that can become a self, according to Winnicott, ‘does the instinctual satisfaction avoid becoming a disrupting factor, or have a meaning beyond its localised meaning as a sample of physiology’ (GUNTRIP 9). In other words, ego-organisation and the sense of self-identity are largely built up through non-consummatory experiences of mutual