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Meaning is embodied in our total affective interest in the world.
In Winnicott's evocative article titled “Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma,” he states that mind “is then no more than a special case of the functioning of the psyche-soma.” Elaborating on this thought he notes that “the word psyche here means the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and function, that is, of physical aliveness” (p. 244). Mind, as he uses the term in this essay, describes a false entity that comes about because of an early environmental failure necessitating a very young individual's taking over some of the functions that the caretaking environment is not providing. In such a situation, mind becomes, in Winnicott's schema, a localized phenomenon, dedicated to compensating and figuring out. It has, of necessity, taken over the functions of a less than optimal caretaking environment. Winnicott describes this compensatory, figuring out, “caretaking-mind” as located in one's head.
But if such a mind is located in one's head and dedicated to compensating for environmental failure through compensatory figuring out and compliance, how should we characterize the healthy functioning of psyche/soma that we ordinarily describe as “mind”? That is, given Winnicott's perspective of psyche/ soma aliveness, how can we understand what we, in ordinary speech, refer to as mind? I believe that we can still speak of mind but in order to do so we have to not only overcome Descartes' live mind-dead matter dichotomy, but also the everyday bias of