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Winnicott is generally regarded as a somewhat revolutionary figure in psychoanalysis. If the term revolutionary may not ring entirely true, there is little doubt that his thinking has spawned a host of significant breakthroughs in the understanding of the child's developmental experience and in deepening the understanding of the vicissitudes of analyst–patient relating in the psychoanalytic process. In general, he opened the door to exploiting aspects of what he had learned about development in the interest of amplifying therapeutic effectiveness, particularly in the treatment of more severe personality disorders. He brought to bear his understanding of transitional experience and transitional phenomena in conceptualizing transference as essentially transitional. He extended his understanding of maternal holding to the role of an analogous form of holding in the analyst–patient relation. Based on his concept of ego- and self-enhancing processes in the parent–child interaction and his insights into the exercises like so-called squiggle game (Winnicott, 1964/1968), he emphasized the role of play and playfulness in the therapist–patient dyad. These and other genial perspectives have contributed immensely to the approach to the analytic situation on the part of many of the current generation of analytic practitioners.
In this article, I focus on some implications of these and some other Winnicottian formulations for the treatment of religiously oriented or committed patients. Winnicott, himself, said very little about this subject. In fact, he said very little directly about his understanding of religious phenomena in general, other than to suggest that religious thinking was one of the areas, along with culture and art, in which transitional phenomena played a central role. In previous reflections, I have tried to extend and amplify these intuitions as they might apply to religious phenomena (Meissner, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992a, 1992b, 1997, 2003, 2005). But the ramificat