Winnicott and the Pattern of Being

Traversing less-examined threads in Winnicott’s work and focusing on the temporal dimensions of experience, the article introduces and examines the concept of a patterning function. The origins of this function are traced back to the rhythmic cycle of need and satisfaction, which Winnicott discusses in terms of object-creation and object-destruction, and which introduces the child with future-directedness and hence a nascent sense of going-on-being. As will be shown, the patterning function may only be associated with external objects après-coup, and the range of such objects is not teleologically set from the start. The consequence of the claim that the patterning function is already found in the infant’s emergent sense of going-on-being, which enables their possible father-identifications, is that the patterning function cannot be claimed to be building on the latter. Using Winnicott’s work, I thus will challenge the assumption that the child’s sense of unity and order are ultimately rooted in their identification with concrete fathers or father figures. This reinterpretation is expected to enable a more efficient application of Winnicott’s insights to the great variety of parenting and family structures and genders and people that we encounter in psychoanalysis today. Unveiling hitherto hidden potentials in Winnicottian thinking, I will further show how the sense of pattern gradually expands into an overall frame or setting of life which the individual must first test and destroy before internalizing it as their personal pattern.