Heidegger and Winnicott
Over the next several posts, I would expect this space to start to reflect two particular projects I am taking up at the moment. The first will be an examination of the role of fatherhood in child development and the complicated process of becoming a father with the aim of ultimately better serving a population that I think can be somewhat overlooked in terms of therapeutic need and provision. Even in just beginning to explore that space, I have found some fascinating psychoanalytic treatises on the topic and I hope I can start to formulate some interesting and worthwhile writing of my own to start populating this space.
The other (and it will be interesting to see how this project informs the first) is something I have been wanting to do for some time: a contemporaneous reading of the works of Martin Heidegger and Donald Winnicott. I think this project is an undertaking of both personal pleasure and also (and I think more importantly) one that seems to me to be repeatedly signaled as worthwhile whenever I endeavor to read either of their works.
Depending on your familiarity, or lack thereof, of these two thinker, you might be inclined find this coupling strange. Or at the very least not obvious. One was a brazen and grandiose German philosopher who wrote one of, if not the central text, of phenomenological ontology and fell victim to the sway of his country’s descent into National-Socialism and rabid antisemitism. The other was a mild-mannered and (seemingly) fundamentally kind British pediatrician who transformed psychoanalytic thought and ushered it into a new relational mode of environmental consideration. Heidegger’s work is conceptually dense and often accused of being indecipherable and obscurantist. Winnicott’s work is peculiar in psychonalaysis in that he was adept at simplifying some of his ideas in the interest of giving public lectures or developing a BBC radio series about child development. Heidegger saw “the They” as a massive intrusion and impediment to ones coming into being authentic. Winnicott thought there was no more important factor to human growth and development than the interactions one has with the others in their life. These and any other overlooked contradictions could appear to make any foray into marrying these two intellectual titans seem like a pretentious theoretical exercise, at best serving to juxtapose them as competing ideological frameworks. However, even more so than the Daseinanalytic that emerged out of the integration of Heidegger and his philosophical precursors with Freud’s early work via thinkers like Medard Boss and Ludwig Binswanger, I think an ability to understand how these two positions speak to and can mutually inform one another could be a basis for a comprehensive and extremely powerful way of thinking about doing the work of therapy.
But where should such a merger begin? I suspect it, in fact, begins with a division, which is the way in which Heidegger and Winnicott both moved away from types of metaphysics and metapsychological interpretations, Heidegger from Kant through his studies with Husserl and Winnicott in his eventual and gradual move away from Freudian metapsychology. Heidegger’s first work was an attempt to reconstitute the nature of being away from a representational one to a Being based on a hermeneutic inquiry into what it means “to be”. Heidegger was not interested in the idea of a psyche which received phenomena from a world “out there” that then gets rendered, structured, and made sense of “in here”. For Heidegger being is being-in-the-world. We are the objects we care about and how we intentionally interact with and use the objects presented to us. Heidegger was part of a philosophical move away from explanation and towards description, that is away from abstract thinking divorced from the way things occur in the world and towards a phenomenological experiential basis which is interested in the way things are disclosed to us, by the manner in which the phenomenon “shows itself from itself”.
Winnicott similarly began as a psychoanalyst seemingly interested in further developing and responding to the various metapsychologies of his time, primarily Freud’s, but also Klein’s and Fairbairn’s. However, as is evident in his later writings, such as those in Playing and Reality and the papers collected in Home is Where We Start From, over time Winnicott seems to be more interested in a kind of phenomenological approach to analysis, rooted in the infants being in a world surrounded by real objects which influence, inform, and drive the infants development along a trajectory of being that is based in a very real understanding of the subjects having a world. Winnicott still falls victim to the use of theoretical and conceptual language at times, but it is clear that even in his use of, let’s say, the word “object” that he is not just talking about the traditional psychoanalytic “object” in the sense of that which gets internalized and projected onto, but an actual other in the world who serves both an internal and external function that is not easily differentiated.
This phenomenological turn becomes the organizing principle around which both Heidegger and Winnicott explore the experiential basis of phenomena such as (a)loneliness, guilt, temporality (seen through Winnicott in his idea of the transitional object), paradox, and the ways in which we as individuals “use” that which exists around us. Interruptions and impingements in what it means for an individual “to be” become cause for philosophical and therapeutic concern. For Heidegger, Dasein (being-there) is the basis for the examination of the phenomenology of ontology, a mode of being that takes up its own being as an “issue” for it, an issue that “comports itself proximally and in a way that is essentially constant—in terms of the world”. For Heidegger being is that which we fundamentally always already are and how we fall in and out of authentic modes of being will become the basis for how we understand being as being both determined for and determined by us. Similarly, Winnicott more than any other analytic thinker before him, constantly uses the word being to demarcate the aspect of existence most impacted by others in the developmental process. For Winnicott “from being comes doing” and the things that get labeled as pathology as often the consequences of disruptions in the “continuity of being”. These disruptions lead to, among other things, the development of a false self that protects the true self from the animosity and destructive capacity of others. This true self becomes something to be mined in the analytic process, encouraged towards a freedom of more authentic expression.
For both, inauthenticity or falseness are fundamental modes of being, though ones that ultimately should be challenged to discover something that is inner most to our existence. Winnicott calls this thing the subject or the self, as the psychoanalytic world at the time was still bound by a distinction between inner and outer (Hans Loewald, a student of Heidegger’s who eventually became an analyst, would later find language within psychoanalysis to dissolve this boundary). For Heidegger, the word “self” is only sparingly used in Being and Time, as the preference for Dasein and Being are supposed to carry forward the idea of our ontological basis as occurring before any subject-object distinction is made. Had Winnicott been a bit more familiar with Heidegger’s ideas or been around to witness Loewald’s contributions to psychoanalytic theory, I suspect he would have approved of this distinction. To wit, his concept of the “mommy-baby” seems a maneuver to introduce just such a set of principles into his own writing, while the idea of transitional object seems to transcend similar kinds of dialectical tensions between self and other, inner and outer.
Again, this is just a basis off which I hope to eventually construct some ways of thinking about the basic problems that clients bring into the consulting room. Ultimately, anyone who enters into the therapeutic process is taking up that space to engage in a more dialogic process into the nature of their own being. How we choose to take up our end of that dialectic goes a long way towards influencing the kind of outcomes one can expect. To signal one direction in which these examinations will go, one thing Heidegger and Winnicott were seemingly both against were a kind of objectification (of the (therapeutic) subject). When conducted thoughtfully, therapy becomes a disclosive space for cultivating a richer understanding of the possibilities of what the experience of being can be. How we (metaphorically) move towards or away from the client, the manner in which we hold the other and hold open the space we share, the kind of potentialities and modes of expression we choose to highlight and reflect back, the kind of “world” we can become for the other’s “being-in” matter considerably more than our telling the other who or what their problem is and being prescriptive in offering a solution. With some more careful consideration, hopefully these two radically different thinkers can provide some insight into how to use the instruments of our own being to help elicit and facilitate these processes in meaningful and affecting ways.
