Religious Thinking as Transitional Conceptualization

Winnicott's genial contributions to the field of psychoanalysis have spawned a revolution in psychoanalytic thinking that has affected our ways of theorizing and has played a powerful role in determining our thinking about the psychoanalytic process and matters of technique. But beyond this central and confined area of application, his ideas regarding transitional objects, transitional object relations, and transitional phenomena have exercised a tremendous influence on our thinking about broader human concerns, touching on questions relevant to the understanding of human cultural experience and issues related to involvement with other human beings and our place in a world that is not of our own making. One of the most important areas in which Winnicott's ideas have taken root and undergone significant evolution is the psychoanalytic understanding of religious phenomena. In that particular area of applied psychoanalysis, his ideas regarding transitional experience and the area of illusion have found their most meaningful extension. I would like to trace the development of Winnicott's thinking about transitional experience and follow some of its elaborations in the religious sphere.

Transitional Objects

Winnicott approached the question of the understanding of illusion through his analysis of transitional objects as a childhood developmental phenomenon (Winnicott, 1953). Winnicott's contributions have elicited a considerable literature on the vicissitudes of the infant's use of transitional objects and the development of transitional