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American Imago, Volume 67, Number 3, Fall 2010, pp. 399-429 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/aim.2010.0020

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 Steven Groarke 399

STEVEN GROARKE

Unthinkable Experience:
Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the
question of being in Winnicott’s clinical thinking. The argument
that Winnicott provides an original theory of being is supported with
reference to his interpretation of the “fear of breakdown” as a reaction
to early trauma. The paper elaborates the ontological as well as the
clinical implications of Winnicott’s account of trauma and its after-
math. It discusses the temporal and spatial aspects of this situation in
terms of disruption of the continuity of being and its fragmentation,
respectively. Experience becomes “unthinkable” for Winnicott on both
counts, and in attempting to link the management of regression in the
analytic setting to his theory of being, the paper comments on some of
the ways in which unthinkable experience appears in literature and
religious language. With particular reference to the relationship between
the work of Winnicott and that of T. S. Eliot, the author makes a case
for the redemptive potential of psychoanalysis and poetry alike.

“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up.”
—Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Richard the Third

Let me begin with a daydream from a patient of mine.

The patient went into her garden to hang out some washing
and quite suddenly found herself in what she described as a
dreamlike state. “Some men approached me,” she said. “They
were coming to execute me. I told them to wait while I sang
a song.” She then regaled her assailants with a rendition of
“Wouldn’t It Be Lovely?” from My Fair Lady. Having sung the
song at the top of her voice, which she also recited by heart to
me in the session, she gave the men the signal to execute her:
“I just raised my finger to let them know they could go ahead.”
I owe a debt of gratitude to Peter L. Rudnytsky and Lewis Allen Kirshner for their
helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

American Imago, Vol. 67, No. 3, 399–429. © 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

399
400 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

Again, she repeated the gesture on the couch, which meant

that the sequence of events in her daydream was reenacted as
it was being told.
What is going on here? How might we understand this
fear of being put to death? Does the act of singing, together
with the recital in the room, betoken hope for life? This essay
may be read as a reflection on these questions via a discussion
of Winnicott’s ontology of disaster and hope.

The ontological implications of Winnicott’s clinical think-

ing deserve more attention than they have so far received. We
have become accustomed to the idea of the continuity of being
in Winnicott’s theory of emotional development, but without
fully acknowledging the importance of being itself for Winni-
cott. To illustrate just how important I think the question of
being is for Winnicott, I shall concentrate on his account of
disaster and its treatment. My comments are based largely on
his posthumously published 1963 paper “Fear of Breakdown”
(1974), in which he describes the fear of breakdown as a reac-
tion to early trauma. In this paper, Winnicott emphasizes the
paradoxical nature of this acute state of anxiety with regard
to the “unthinkable” experience of the early traumatic situa-
tion. The paradox refers to the fear of a breakdown that has
already taken place, resulting in a thoroughly ambiguous sense
of experience.
The emphasis here is on the existential question of being
rather than on the creation of meaning in language. Winnicott
is not concerned with the ordinary ambiguity pertaining to
prereflective thought, but rather with the extent to which expe-
rience is rendered fundamentally ambiguous in the aftermath
of infantile trauma. The failure to make sense of experience is
approached in terms of a catastrophic break in the existential
fabric of the infant’s life, and is set out in Winnicott’s account
at the level of time and place. I shall discuss the temporal and
spatial aspects of unthinkable experience in turn.
At various points in my discussion, I will allude to the
cultural context of Winnicott’s thought, drawing attention to
 Steven Groarke 401

common themes in psychoanalytic, literary, and religious dis-

course. It will be perfectly clear that this is not intended as a
detailed comparative reading. The point is to suggest ways in
which a vocabulary of being may be elaborated on the basis of
Winnicott’s psychoanalytic perspective. Nevertheless, the refer-
ences to the imaginative and stylistic resources of the canonical
English Bible, to Shakespeare and Milton, and to Eliot’s late
Christian poetry, especially the Four Quartets, are a central part
of my argument. While a biblical mode of imagining is clearly
evident in Shakespeare and Milton (Fisch 1999), as well as in
Eliot, my argument is that this indebtedness to the Bible extends
through these literary sources to Winnicott’s clinical thinking.
The cultural allusions, then, are not meant simply as an anal-
ogy to Winnicott’s thought. I believe these works provide the
indispensable groundwork for Winnicott’s theory of being.
Starting with the temporal aspects of the unthinkable,
Winnicott proposes that under traumatic conditions there is
a discontinuity of being at the origin. More like a basic fault
than a constitutive split, the discontinuity of being comes about
under adverse conditions. Anxiety is seen here as a reaction
to original “environmental failure.” Winnicott describes how
the infant defends “against specific environmental failure by
a freezing of the failure situation” (1954, 281), resulting in what
he calls a “queer kind of truth” where one fails to experience
what has already been lived through. The metaphor of “freez-
ing” conveys a sense of wintertime in the mind—cold, hostile,
cheerless—as well as an attempted anesthetic maneuver against
primitive psychic pain. It is precisely the failure to experience
the experience of disaster in all its painfulness that, under these
bleak and inhospitable conditions, characterizes the loss of
being at the origin. The experience that has not been experi-
enced but remains “unthinkable” constitutes an erasure at the
origin of being, not an empty world so much as emptiness in
place of the world. This is entirely different from the ambiguity
of experience pertaining to the natural state of prereflective
thought. The meaning of winter in the metaphor runs counter
to the natural time of birth or the source of life, evoking an
end before the beginning.
As Winnicott describes it, however, the “failure” that comes
back as a fear of breakdown does not result in an entirely hope-
402 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

less situation. Instead, the “freezing” of original failure puts the

continuity of being on hold; the idea of “freezing” suggests not
only the loss of feeling but also a hibernal state of being in the
world. The erasure inherent in the experience of disaster, the
aporia of being, keeps alive the underlying sense of existential
continuity, albeit in a dormant state. Exposed to a consistently
inhospitable environment, being becomes the profound diffi-
culty it experiences at the beginning. It seems there are many
ways of going on being, and even when the infant’s reaction to
failure (“impingement”) results in the “annihilation of personal
being,” Winnicott argues that it is accompanied by “an uncon-
scious assumption (which can become a conscious hope) that
opportunity will occur at a later date for a renewed experience
in which the failure situation will be able to be unfrozen and
re-experienced” (1954, 281).
Looked at from a dialectical point of view, even the “an-
nihilation of being,” the failure of being to appear at the
beginning, is a way of going on being. Winnicott reminds us
that being continues to prepare for itself in many ways. Thus,
with respect to memory traces frozen or encapsulated in an
“unconscious assumption,” the “fear of breakdown” constitutes
a prefiguration of the coming of being. The execution fantasy
with which I began may be seen in these terms, where the song
acts as an accompaniment to a kind of hibernaculum in the
patient’s mind.
The point is that, however fragmented the infant may feel
in his or her mind, the thread of lived experience is not actu-
ally broken, but is held in parenthesis on this side of chaos.
It is as if the infant holds onto something that comes before
being in the world. Holds onto what exactly? As with Bion, I
think Winnicott allows for a proto-mental configuration of the
maternal, an “object” given in intuition, in tandem with and
inseparable from the infant’s sensuous experience—something
like an encounter with the mother in the infant’s perception
before he actually gets to know her. Winnicott’s description
of the unthinkable implies that being with someone comes
before any knowledge that one has of the presence or absence
of the experience.
Something needs to be there, something has to be in place,
in order for there to be the “breakdown that has already been
 Steven Groarke 403

experienced” (1974, 90) to begin with. There is no sugges-

tion here of an idealization of unknowing, but before there is
any “knowledge” of being in the world, there is a primordial
experience of being with one another. The paradox of this
primordial experience may be understood in terms of the in-
fant’s intuition of the object that it needs to find, an intuition
of being before being in the world. What grounds would there
be, otherwise, for hope out of the fragmentation of being? The
ground has to be given for the mind to feel itself in fragments
and, subsequently, for hope to endure against the background
of “frozen” or encapsulated memory. On this reading, unthink-
able experience is rooted in the intuition of being, and the
intuition in turn accords with Winnicott’s notion of primary
creative experiencing.
This account of being has direct clinical and technical im-
plications. If the thought of “renewal” is to carry any therapeutic
weight at all, there has to be some way of making up something
in place of what was not there in reality at the beginning. André
Green (2002, 20), who finds Winnicott wanting at this point,
dismisses as naïve the therapeutic claims that Winnicott makes
for the experience of renewal. It would be naïve to think that it
is sufficient for the patient simply to add his or her signature,
as it were, to the analyst’s instantiation of the maternal imago.
The analyst cannot become the mother whom the infant never
had. As an elderly patient said to me, “You can’t give me a crash
course in childhood.” She remained scathing at the thought of
being fobbed off with what she called a “surrogate,” the artificial
nature of which exacerbated her despair at having missed out,
as she saw it, on any real nourishment at the beginning.
But this is not how I understand Winnicott’s description
of the analytic situation. Unlike Alexander (1950; Alexander
and French 1946), he is not proposing the idea of psychoanaly-
sis as a “corrective emotional experience,” if that means an
analyst deliberately presenting himself or herself as different
from the patient’s actual mother. Instead, Winnicott extends
the analytic framework of transference-countertransference in
accordance with what we might call the latent hope of encapsu-
lated memory. This seems to me to be an essential part of the
clinical practice of psychoanalysis as envisaged by Winnicott.
The analyst finds it necessary at times to make contact with the
404 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

experience of being on behalf of the patient so that, in turn,

the patient is able to become someone in the world.
There are two aspects to the situation I am describing,
both of which relate to the question of knowledge. First, far
from being the passive recipient of a retrospective solution to
an original problem, the patient sends out primitive longings
or intuition of being to meet the embodiment of the good
object in the analyst. The intuition of being elicits something
developmental from the analyst, making the analyst the kind of
person the patient needs the analyst to be. The analyst cannot
know what is needed ahead of the patient’s demand.
Second, rather than needing to know what happened
in the past in order to be free of it, this meeting affirmed by
the intuition of being is about a way of imagining the past so
that it might become a reality in the present. The aboriginal
calamity has happened, and now it is down to the work of the
imagination to amend the situation and augment the capacity
for aliveness. Far from being naïve, the subtlety here consists
in rendering imagination itself as an act of faith, if not a spon-
taneous gesture of hope. It is the “unconscious assumption” in
Winnicott’s description of ontological fragmentation that does
the real work. I cannot think of anyone who has grasped the
patient’s urgent need to render the intuition of being as a gesture
of being more persistently than Winnicott. Neville Symington
seems to understand this better than Green, describing how
a patient forced him “with all the strength in her being to be
the analyst she needed” (2007, 44).
Green is not alone in raising doubts about Winnicott’s
claims for the redemptive potential of psychoanalysis. There
is an ongoing debate about the significance of Freud’s meta-
psychology in Winnicott, with recent contributions from both
sides (Fulgencio 2007; Girard 2010). At the same time, his
adaptations and revisions of classical Freudian technique have
been criticized by Hanna Segal for “enacting and mobilizing
primitive transferences rather than analyzing them” (qtd. in
Rodman 2003, 262). As Elizabeth Bott Spillius points out,
Kleinian analysts in general “strongly disagree with the idea
of encouraging regression and reliving infantile experiences
in the consulting room through non-interpretive activities.
Analytic care, in [Klein’s] view, should take the form of a
 Steven Groarke 405

stable analytic setting containing within it a correct interpre-

tive process” (1988, 6).
There is no doubt that Winnicott held hands with some
of his patients, provided them with blankets, tissues, tea, and
biscuits, and extended the length of their analytic sessions. I
do not think this means, however, that he actively encouraged
patients to regress in the formal sense. Like many analysts, he
seems to have accepted the fact that regression is inevitable
in psychoanalysis, and that patients make use of regression to
dependence within the analytic setting, where the acknowledg-
ment of dependence, together with the return from regression,
is managed by the analyst. Personally, I think Winnicott makes
the case against his critics. Noninterpretive interventions are
required as an essential part of the psychoanalytic task in many
if not all cases, and the patient is able to regress to dependence
where the analytic process itself provides for the safe manage-
ment of regression.
My argument is that Winnicott makes a case for the
technique of regression, precisely in terms of an original psy-
choanalytic theory of being. In particular, he presupposes an
aboriginal expectation or primitive longing on the strength of
which, even when things go disastrously wrong, there is subse-
quently something to work with and toward. Within the analytic
framework of object relations theory, Winnicott has made an
incomparable work of the aftermath. Where the sense of being
has broken down to begin with, he invests the contemporary
experience of an imagined past with a redemptive promise.
I intend to make some strong claims for redemption in this
paper—largely so as to identify Winnicott with a particular line
of thought in the English cultural and religious imagination.

The fear of breakdown, as Winnicott describes it, contains

the sense that something terrible has happened, but it also
communicates the aspiration to persevere in being. Seamus
Heaney renders both sides of this anxiety in his remarkable
poem “Keeping Going” (1996), where something he calls
“stamina” continues to work its way through unthinkable ex-
406 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

perience as a manifestation of the perseverance of being: “My

dear brother, you have good stamina. / You stay on where it
happens” (ll. 67–68).
It seems to me that our “staying on” and “keeping going”
where it happened is the best we can hope for in the aftermath
of disaster. If this reading of the disaster is in any way correct,
it means that the analyst embodies not the object hoped for as
much as the grounds for hope. Analysis provides the patient
in this case with a facilitative rather than a substitutive envi-
ronment. I take it as axiomatic that no re-creation of a past
event can ever occur in the analytic setting. The redemptive
aspect of the analytic process does not involve uncovering the
hidden contents of past traumas; more than a search for what
lies behind, the process involves gaining access to lived expe-
rience in the present in order to help the patient feel more
alive. Whatever can be made present takes precedence over
anything that is represented. The time of breakdown remains
paradoxical here on two counts: first, the loss of being involves
a failure to experience what has already been experienced.
Second, the event of disaster is based on the assumption, if
not the hope, that one might reexperience what has not yet
been experienced.
What does it mean to reexperience the loss of being at
the origin? Under what conditions is this possible? What, ex-
actly, does the promise of redemption mean in psychoanalysis?
I think the reverberations of Christian religious language in
Winnicott’s ontology of disaster are important, particularly with
respect to the redemption of the imagination. For patients liv-
ing in fear of a breakdown that has already happened, there is
a fundamental derangement of memory and mourning alike.
Winnicott’s account of unthinkable experience in the face of
primordial loss inscribes memory itself at the limit of the work
of mourning. Following the feeling of annihilation as a result of
original failure, being comes back to itself not as memory but
as “the equivalent of remembering” (Winnicott 1974, 92).
This means that the identification of an experience
equal in value to memory provides grounds for hope without
recourse to historical time, which suggests something akin to
the figure of restoration on the model of biblical narrative.
How else could the promise work? Analysis cannot make up
 Steven Groarke 407

for lost time. This is what my patient meant when she told me
that I could not provide her with a crash course in childhood.
The breakdown of being at the origin means not only that no
one was there to experience the failure but also that there
are no memories of what actually happened. Being without
memory is an essential part of the problem. Memory itself
becomes part of the paradox of disaster where that which has
already taken place has yet to be experienced. What I call the
work of the aftermath is based on the idea of imagination as
the equivalent of memory. Imagination in this case becomes
memory: “The only way to ‘remember’ in this case is for the
patient to experience this past thing for the first time in the
present” (Winnicott 1974, 92).
My argument does not assume doctrinal sentiment on Win-
nicott’s part. The point is that Winnicott posits a paradoxical
state of mind in which memory is overlaid by an expectation
without past experience. The overlay allows for what is to come
by providing a surface on which imagination emerges as an
act of faith.
I find I can make more sense of Winnicott’s descriptions of
disaster and hope by tracing the religious as well as the literary
reverberations of his clinical thinking. No doubt the ontologi-
cal aspects of his thought can be elaborated in any number of
ways. But it seems to me that Winnicott’s use of faith rests, in
particular, on the idea of a covenant along the lines of the re-
newal of God’s promise to Abraham in the time of Moses (Exod.
6.6). Winnicott keeps faith with this promise of renewal as part
of what Michael Eigen calls the “foundational journey” (1993,
128) of primary creativity, transitional experiencing, and object
usage. This makes of faith an “unconscious assumption” in the
context of disaster and hope, where the promise of renewal is
combined with the paradox of unthinkable experience.
The latter is rendered in poetic as well as religious language
by T. S. Eliot at the end of “Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease
from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will
be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the
first time” (ll. 242–45).1 Underlining the redemptive reading
of the poem, Helen Gardner (1978) quotes from Eliot’s notes
for the last of his Quartets: “They vanish, the individuals, and
our feeling for them sinks into the flame which refines. They
408 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

emerge in another pattern & recreated & reconciled redeemed,

having their meaning together not apart, in a union which is
of beams from the central fire” (157).
There is a good deal of biographical as well as textual
evidence to support the view of Winnicott’s indebtedness to
Eliot. For example, in a letter to Bion dated October 5, 1967,
he writes as follows:

I am not quite settled in my mind about the idea of

memory and desire or intention. When I got home Clare
reminded me again that the phrase memory and desire,
which you have used before, is a quotation from T. S. Eliot,
and she was able to give me the whole poem, and for some
reason or other I accept memory and desire as naturally
interrelated in the poem. (Rodman 1987, 169)

He is referring, of course, to the opening lines of Eliot’s “The

Waste Land,” which invoke “mixing / Memory and desire”
(ll. 2–3). More important, perhaps, Winnicott also gives us an
insight into his positive evaluation of the “interrelated” literary
and biblical meanings in the poem, including Eliot’s “Son of
man” (l. 20)—after Ezekiel 2.1—in a world where “the dead
tree gives no shelter” (l. 23), “desire shall fail” (Eccles. 12.5),
and the question of hope is put to the very ground of things
in accordance with “the roots that clutch” (l. 19).
In his biography, Brett Kahr (1996, 106) also confirms Win-
nicott’s debt to Eliot, noting the pleasure he took in hearing
his wife recite poetry, particularly by Eliot and Dylan Thomas.
Marion Milner (1972, 250) suggests a reading of Winnicott’s
“quietude linked with stillness” in consonance with Eliot’s lines
from “Burnt Norton”: “still point of the turning world” (l. 64)
and “Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence” (ll. 142–43).
The title of Winnicott’s unfinished autobiography, Not Less
Than Everything, is a quotation from the final section of “Little
Gidding” (l. 257), from which he also took the epigraph for
his book. Finally, a collection of his essays has also appeared
under a title taken from Four Quartets: “Home is where one
starts from” (l. 194), which is from the final section of “East
Coker”—providing, again, the epigraph for the book.
 Steven Groarke 409

Alongside the debt to Eliot, the King James Bible remains

in back of Winnicott’s thought, and a consciousness of biblical
allusion runs throughout his work. For instance, Winnicott’s
poem “The Tree,” written on November 4, 1963 (cited in Rod-
man 2003, 289–91), exemplifies Winnicott’s reliance on the
language of the English Bible. Together with his thoughts on
the fear of breakdown, the poem—the title of which picks up
Eliot’s “dead tree” as well as the “True Cross” in old English
poetry—forms an important part of Winnicott’s late works, in
which his ongoing concern with anxieties about survival takes
a new and decisive turn.
Thus, his most recent biographer describes how in “a junc-
ture, or series of junctures” throughout the 1960s, Winnicott
“moved into new and ever more profound territory” (Rodman
2003, 286). The exemplary claim of the late works concerns the
exigency of return, or survival in the face of destructiveness,
where exteriority is no longer confined to introjective-projective
mechanisms. Winnicott argues consistently throughout this
period that the object survives destruction, precisely “outside
the area of objects set up by the subject’s projective mental
mechanisms” (1968, 227).
The way in which “The Tree” articulates Winnicott’s central
theme of survival is particularly illuminating when it comes
to unthinkable experience. To revisit my earlier commentary
(2003) in light of the present discussion, the poem gives voice
to the “agonizing task” of bringing the dead mother back to life
as the groundwork of becoming a person oneself. Winnicott,
who was sixty-seven years old when he wrote the poem, had less
than ten years left to live, and while his mother had been dead
for almost forty years, it is her “inward death” that weights the
poem and places its intuition of being before the origin: “The sins
of the whole world weigh less than this / woman’s heaviness.”
“To enliven her,” as Winnicott writes, “was my living.”
Here as elsewhere, the emphasis is on lived experience,
and Winnicott seems to have found inspiration for this “ago-
nizing task” not only in the theme of resurrection but also in
a resuscitated language. The redemptive work of “The Tree”
takes place between times, even as Christ incarnates God. As
distinct from the work of mourning, the poem articulates the
temporal aspect of unthinkable experience in the movement
410 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

between the mother as “I knew her // Once, stretched out

on her lap / as now on a dead tree,” and, on the other hand,
the imperative of “my father’s business,” or the time of “I must
be.” While Rodman’s comments about Winnicott’s identifica-
tion with Christ seem rather overstated to me, he nonetheless
includes a useful footnote (2003, 411n8) by Eric Korn that
focuses on the Hebrew and Christian sources in the poem.
Characteristically, Winnicott eschews classical legend in
favor of biblical language refracted through the traditions of
English Romantic poetry and Celtic Christianity. The poem
questions the work of its own making, and by implication the
process of becoming a person, in the following terms: “O Glas-
tonbury // Must I bring even these thorns to flower? / even
this dead tree to leaf?”
Korn provides some of the relevant background here.
In Celtic legend, the Glastonbury thorn is part of the True
Cross, brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea, who, it is
believed, also buried Jesus in a tomb of his own making and
later founded the first Christian Church of England at Glas-
tonbury. Moreover, Winnicott states the essential relation to
oneself as to one’s death (“It is I who die”) in the language
of the canonical Gospels, left untranslated in the poem in an
Aramaic idiom: “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud
voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being
interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
(Mark 15.34). The task of bringing the dead (mother) back to
life doubles Christ’s unthinkable agony (Matthew 26.38–39) as
it appears in the poem.
The question is what inspires Winnicott’s decision, in the
act of writing the poem, to couple “the cruelty of the nail’s
hatred” with the mother’s “weeping.” For Rodman, this is es-
sentially an autobiographical question concerning Winnicott’s
early contact with a depressed mother. But it is also a historical
question concerning the conditions of figuration and imagina-
tion in an English mode of thought. The poem is redemptive
in the tradition of English Romantic poetry. To redeem “inward
death” would require the transformation of religion back into
poetry after the Fall from Eternity, while the failure to do so,
which is inevitable from the Romantic viewpoint of our mo-
dernity, is essentially what turns the poem into an allegory of
 Steven Groarke 411

illusion-disillusionment and, at the same time, a doubling of

unthinkable experience.
With regard to the more immediate question of disaster
and hope, I think the references to God’s promise as well as
to Eliot’s rendering of the time of meaning and value—his
summoning of the dead—are implicit in Winnicott’s own ver-
sion of the redemption of time as reliving. To the extent that
the latter presupposes a mode of imagining modeled on the
Incarnation, it puts Winnicott directly at odds with Freud, who
remains critical throughout of any kind of redemptive reading
of time. Winnicott conceives of being and time in a way that
does not allow for Freud’s (1927) critique of illusion as the
negative value of reality.
In particular, Freud and Winnicott hold alternative views
about the use we make of time. Instead of the Freudian idea
of “working-through,” Winnicott imagines “another pattern”
for unthinkable experience that accords more with Heaney’s
(1995) idea of the “redress of poetry.” For Winnicott, as for
Heaney, the creative impulse is first and foremost an imagined
response, a promise to respond, and we make use of poetry, on
this reading, “to be forwarded within ourselves” (159).
In the case of disaster, this imagined response to conditions
in the world becomes a work of the aftermath. In accordance
with an unconscious aboriginal expectation that reaches back
before the existential experience of loss, the work of mourning
is displaced by the work of the aftermath, understood as the
enactment of imaginary resurrections. Nor is it simply a matter
of putting things into words; there are experiences for which
words cannot be found. To conjure a world out of the frag-
ments of being requires a particular work of the imagination,
including receptivity to states of mind without representation.
It seems to me that this involves an imaginative work of psychic
figurability (Botella and Botella 2005) as an act of faith, a work
that takes place within what Eigen (1993) calls the area of faith.
Eigen underlines the central role that faith plays in Winnicott’s
account of the continuity of being, demonstrating the extent
to which “faith evolves from transitional experiencing through
object use” (1993, 110).
412 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

My point is that the analyst keeps faith with these “areas of

experiencing” in the aftermath of infantile trauma. Thus, the
combined ontological and clinical focus of Winnicott’s think-
ing calls into question the representation of trauma and, at
the same time, the primacy of transference interpretation. To
begin with, the past is present as hope not in what the patient
says or in the analyst’s formulations, but rather in a formal
regression of thinking at the level of the analyst’s free-floating
attention.

The problem is how to sound out the silence of the un-

thinkable, how to allow for what lies beyond language even in
words themselves. Winnicott thus makes use of the body and
its rhythms as well as words. He models “renewed experience”
on the intimacies as well as the promise of maternal care, in
particular the experiences of “infant feeding and manage-
ment” (1969, 258). Consider the following description from
the analysis of a forty-year-old woman:

[S]he and I were together with her hand in my hands

. . . . Without deliberate action on the part of either
of us there developed a rocking rhythm. The rhythm
was rather a rapid one, about 70 per minute (cf. heart-
beat), and I had to do some work to adapt to this rate.
Nevertheless, there we were with mutuality expressed in
terms of a slight but persistent rocking movement. We
were communicating with each other without words. This
was taking place at a level of development that did not
require the patient to have maturity in advance of that
which she found herself possessing in the regression to
dependence of the phase of her analysis. (258)

As Winnicott points out, the essential thing here is the com-

munication between the patient and the analyst based on the
intimacies of the mother—infant relationship, particularly the
recourse to “the anatomy and physiology of live bodies” (1969,
258). Winnicott contrasts this experience of mutuality, which
 Steven Groarke 413

grounds reliving as a mode of communication without words,

to the Freudian model of transference and interpretation. To
the extent that it enables the patient to experience “this past
thing” here and now “for the first time,” regression to depen-
dence is an alternative way of achieving something comparable
to “the lifting of repression that occurs in the analysis of the
psycho-neurotic patient” (1974, 92). To communicate in this
way means, as Thomas Ogden has put it, “uninterruptedly to
be that human place in which the patient is becoming whole”
(2004, 1352).
Being with one another is the analytic process, where reliv-
ing is the equivalent of memory, and regression to dependence
produces an outcome equal in therapeutic value to the inter-
pretation of the neurotic transference. Without the intuition
of being, I cannot see how the analytic process could possibly
facilitate the patient’s becoming a person along these lines in
any meaningful sense.
The idea that reliving is equivalent to remembering rep-
resents an important and original contribution to our under-
standing of time and being. For Winnicott, the patient does
not remember something that actually happened; there is no
going back in this case to the beginning; the time of break-
down is more archaic even than the beginning of the world,
more archaic than any foundation whatever. Disaster renders
the origin an “agony” of remembrance in the parentheses of
being. The assumption, if not the hope, of persevering in be-
ing places the patient at the very beginning of the past, in the
immemorial traces of the beginning.
A patient who had been considering taking some part-
time work teaching English to refugees suddenly found herself
comparing the work with her analysis. “It’s what we’re doing
here,” she said, “trying to make a language from nothing.” It
was important for this patient that I was able to understand
that there are experiences for which we cannot find words, and
even so, words have to be found where she felt none existed.
The patient felt as if she was using words that nothing earlier
foreshadowed. More than a surprise, it felt to her as if there
was an emergence out of nowhere into language. Thus, to
relive the past “for the first time in the present” and to “know
the place for the first time” is itself a beginning, rather than
414 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

a return in the ordinary sense of the word. Again, what really

mattered for this patient was gaining greater access to lived
experience in the present, even if that meant finding ourselves
together without words.
Here as elsewhere, the example of Shakespeare is para-
digmatic for English psychoanalysis. The pattern of loss and
renewal in the late plays, particularly in The Winter’s Tale (first
performed in 1611 but not printed until the 1623 First Folio),
sheds important light on Winnicott’s ontology of disaster and
hope. That the Christian interpretation of The Winter’s Tale is
contentious need not concern us here. What is clear is that
Leontes suffers a catastrophic fall and is redeemed by the res-
urrection of Hermione. To be sure, The Winter’s Tale admits
a perfectly intelligible reading on the combined Freudian-
Kleinian model of repression and projective identification. It
is instructive to approach the play from the point of view of
Leontes’ repressed homosexual desire for Polixenes, and the
subsequent projection of his guilt onto Hermione in the form
of persecutory anxiety. Concentrating our interpretative efforts
on Leontes’ unconscious need for betrayal tells us a good deal
about the nature of his paranoid delusions.
The Freudian interpretation has much to commend it,
but the point at which paranoia runs to nihilism engages us in
a different kind of reading of Shakespeare’s play. The fear of
breakdown, as Winnicott describes it, resonates with Leontes’
fear of nothingness, the fear of being nothing. “If this be noth-
ing” (1.2.339) (i.e., if my suspicions of marital infidelity prove
groundless), then all is nothing and, therefore, I am nothing.
As well as a projection of guilt, Leontes’ sexual jealousy may also
be seen as a sign of a deeper, more primitive anxiety that noth-
ing means anything. The Winter’s Tale turns on the seemingly
incalculable movement of Leontes’ fear of being nothing and
the countermovement of life in the second half of the play. The
Shepherd voices the turning point: “Thou met’st with things
dying, I with things newborn” (4.1.99), “things” that Autolycus
and Perdita, albeit in fundamentally different ways, elaborate
toward renewal and reliving. That it takes the redemption of
the imagination itself to counter nihilism is evident, finally, in
the speeches in which Paulina conjures being out of disaster as
 Steven Groarke 415

an act of faith. As she says to Leontes: “It is required / You do

awake your faith” (5.3.114–15).
The literary resonance of Winnicott’s legacy is no less
important than his imaginative sources. While Shakespeare
remains the paradigm for survived extremity, and Eliot’s late
Christian poetry provides an imaginative framework for the
redemption of time, Samuel Beckett reminds us that words
alone are not enough. In both his fiction and his plays, Beckett
explores the paradox of time and being in a way that is entirely
sympathetic with Winnicott’s description of unthinkable expe-
rience. The fear that nothing means anything (I am nothing)
lies at the heart of Beckett’s work. Beckett stakes the imagina-
tion against the intuition of nihilism as against the death of
the imagination itself.
In the final sequence of Footfalls (1975), for instance, we
see exactly the kind of inner torment that is expressed through
the fear of breakdown, where May relives her absent presence
in the imaginary dialogue between the mother (Mrs. W) and
her child (Amy): “Amy: I saw nothing, heard nothing, of any
kind. I was not there. Mrs. W: Not there? Amy: Not there. Mrs.
W: But I heard you respond” (37).
In scenes like this, which often involve old men and women
alone and haunted by the semblance of memory, Beckett ef-
fectively calls into question the work of mourning, revealing
a dilemma that goes to the heart of things where “memory”
cannot but fail to return what has been lost even before the
experience of loss. The work leaves us with what Beckett calls
a “fidelity to failure” (1965, 125), where it seems the best we
can hope for, with Beckett as with Thomas Hardy in “Places”
(1930), is “a presence more than the actual brings” (l.25).
Talk of the mother in Beckett’s work will get us only so
far. If something is to come of nothing in these situations, one
must call upon “the unknowable ground of creativeness as
such” (Eigen 1993, 135) rather than upon a maternal introject.
Indeed, what returns in this case interrupts the inheritance of
remembrance itself as it extends in the English literary imagi-
nation from Wordsworth to Seamus Heaney.
The dilemma of being is lived out as a fear of breakdown
time and again in Beckett’s writing. He attends unflinchingly to
416 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

the risks of living amid the feared situations of danger, including

that one is left “revolving it all” (1975, 37) in an interminable
agony of false beginnings. The question of being, therefore, is
posed in the face of helplessness: what lies on the other side of
my patient’s communication to me that, whatever she failed to
experience in her childhood, it cannot be brought back through
a short-lived but intensive program of treatment?
Beckett has nothing immediately to offer by way of a solu-
tion to the problems he imagines. There is no reason why he
should. Winnicott, on the other hand, raises the therapeutic
question of how to make good the disaster of unthinkable ex-
perience. In circumstances where agony outweighs grief and
is more primitive than the feeling of sadness, Winnicott comes
to the conclusion that the exigency of return is carried by the
use of faith as reliving. He articulates the paradox of disaster
with respect to the experience of that which was the beginning.
Reliving requires imagination as an act of faith—not least of all
on account of the fact that experience folds back to its begin-
ning only to find that there is nothing there, save the fragments
of being caught up in the semblance of memory.

The experience of the unthinkable requires us to revisit

analytic technique. The blurring of the distinction between real
and imagined memories is important for the understanding
of being, but also for the psychoanalytic treatment of disaster.
As well as the ontological presupposition of hope, the tech-
nical argument also turns on the link between reliving and
regression. By mapping types of psychic breakdown across the
sequential stages of dependence, Winnicott (1954) sets out the
“management” of psychotic anxieties at the limits of memory,
prior to the origin, in a past that has never been experientially
present. As in the cases mentioned above, Winnicott identifies
the therapeutic needs of those patients who have suffered en-
vironmental failure at the beginning in terms of regression to
dependence. “The setting of analysis,” he argues, “reproduces
the early and earliest mothering techniques. It invites regres-
sion by reason of its reliability” (286).
 Steven Groarke 417

Although patients may feel they are being encouraged by

the analyst to act out their regressive states, the “invitation”
issues from the analytic process itself, including the use the
patient makes of the analyst. The technique involves going
back, so to speak, with the patient in the analytic setting to
the early environment and its infringement of being, but yet
without recourse to the representation of the past effected
by memory. There is no such representation available in the
aftermath of disaster. The regression to states of dependence
relies on what comes to pass through the reliving of a kind
of latent birth. The intuition of being becomes a living ex-
perience in the analytic setting, as Winnicott put it, through
a “specialised environmental provision interlocked with the
patient’s regression” (1954, 286). To recall the technical and
ontological paradox at its most basic, something comes back
in the present for the first time.
To take an example from Winnicott’s analytic practice,
Margaret Little gives a detailed account of the use of regres-
sion in her own case. Little describes how she agreed to go
into hospital as a voluntary patient during the summer break,
allowing thereby for what she calls an “extension” of the analytic
setting. “In my sessions with D. W.,” Little recalls,

there had been “token” infant care; he always opened

the door to me himself, each session wound up with
coffee and biscuits, he saw to it that I was warm and
comfortable, and provided tissues, etc. But here was the
full “regression to dependence,” an extension of what he
had given me; and he kept in constant touch with the
hospital and sent me postcards letting me know where
he was. (1990, 60)

Winnicott makes it quite clear that regression in the ana-

lytic setting is not a technique of memory any more than it is a
work of mourning. This is due to the fact that, psychologically
speaking, there was no one there to experience the original
failure: “It is not really true to say that the patient is trying to
remember madness which has been and around which defences
were organised” (1965a, 127). And yet, while the breakdown
was not experienced when it “took place” originally, life for
418 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

Winnicott is nonetheless never too far away from its roots, no

matter how calamitous the sense of beginning.
This still leaves the question of what is to become of being
in such devastated circumstances. What clings to the original
place? What remains from a time when the infant was absolutely
reliant for its sense of being and security on maternal care?
The very ambiguity of “the original place” renders hope as a
question of imagined resurrection rather than a problem of
developmental progress. Winnicott is not suggesting a work of
“reparation” along Kleinian lines; rather, beyond the damage
wrought by the deficiencies of the environment at the begin-
ning, he proposes something like emotional resuscitation as
the groundwork for becoming a person.
Winnicott differentiates the fundamental problem of
survival from the Kleinian model of innate aggression and
reparation. There is amendment in survived extremity, that
is to say, in the form of recovery from a basic fault by begin-
ning again. I am using the term amendment, then, with Balint
(1952; 1968) as well as Winnicott in mind. Together with the
mending of original failure, the emphasis on the mother in the
infant’s mind at the origin (the arch-Mother) is nonetheless
more Miltonic than Kleinian, intimating a world regained, a
life resumed, out of the most archaic ruins. In Milton’s words,
“The end then of Learning is to repair the ruines of our first
Parents by regaining to know God aright” (1644, 557).
Regression is presented along these lines as a therapeutic
technique capable of holding, or containing, the patient on
the “assumption”—I would say the intuition—that there was
an original place of being. Even if there was no one there to
receive the primordial intuition of being, that is to say, no one
there to prevent the disaster, Winnicott describes a hope that
there is nonetheless something to recover from the fragments.
The hope remains that there was something given to begin
with. The imagined resurrections of regression take place only
insofar as the place of being itself is regained.
As such, the time of breakdown is immediately spatial; this
is how Little describes it: “[Winnicott] told me that such fear
of annihilation as I felt belonged to ‘annihilation’ that had
already happened: I had been annihilated psychically, but had
in fact survived bodily, and was now emotionally reliving the
 Steven Groarke 419

past experience” (Little 1990, 62). Again, the daydream with

which I began contains the psychic traces of annihilation, but
also the song that issues from corporeal survival.
It takes the madness of time, as it were, to revive the conti-
nuity of being, to transform unthinkable anxiety into imagined
resurrections, and to get back by means of an act of faith to
the place of being even before the beginning. Winnicott keeps
faith with this kind of madness, lest the patient be left without
grounds for hope. Like Eliot, it seems Winnicott had enough
of the right kind of imagination to turn hope toward the past,
a purgatorial hope against despair. Moreover, his use of faith
also anticipates a work of the unthinkable that bears comparison
in certain fundamental respects with Shakespeare and Beck-
ett, a work that has since been elaborated along clinical lines
in the French school of André Green (1983), Pierre Marty
(1976), César and Sára Botella (2005), and others. Disagree-
ments notwithstanding, there is important common ground
between Winnicott and these French analysts with respect to
the nonrepresented experience of early trauma (“traumatic
transference”) and the concomitant emphasis on the analyst’s
“work of figurability” in amending and augmenting the as-
sociative field: “In extreme situations, the work of figurability
allows the analyst to maintain his analysand’s investment and
to preserve his own capacities for representation” (Botella and
Botella 2005, 37).

I want to say something now about being and place,

about the spatial aspect of unthinkable experience. Winnicott
(1950–55) proposes that, as part of the overall situation or en-
vironment, the actual mother “embodies a time factor” (206).
The notion of the environment-mother underpins Winnicott’s
account of being and world. He introduces the term holding to
account for the basic care that is seen to characterize being in
the world: “A wide extension of ‘holding’ allows this one term
to describe all that a mother does in the physical care of her
baby” (1969, 259). This is how he describes things at the begin-
ning: “With a good-enough technique [of basic maternal care]
420 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

the centre of gravity of being in the environment-individual

set-up can afford to lodge in the centre, in the kernel rather
than in the shell” (1952, 99).
Holding articulates being and dwelling in Winnicott, and
involves taking care of the whole “set-up” where the infant is
made to feel at home in the world: “The human being now
developing an entity from the centre can become localized
in the baby’s body and so begin to create an external world
at the same time as acquiring a limiting membrane and an
inside” (1952, 99). The kind of care described here holds
good for the infant even when the world threatens to shatter.
Notwithstanding the precariousness of things (both internally
and externally), basic care constitutes the indwelling of our-
selves in the place of being at the origin. It is precisely the
breakdown of this holding environment that constitutes the
space of disaster for Winnicott, resulting in the dislocation and
fragmentation of being.
The account of aliveness and its breakdown is set out spe-
cifically in terms of the environmental conditions of emotional
development. For Winnicott, the mother and her baby are held
together at the beginning as modifications of the same life; they
abide one within the other before relations and reciprocity in a
yet more primitive state of “mutuality.” Winnicott consistently
rejects accounts of emotional development that start with the
ego or the subject and then let relations to others and the
world come forth or emerge. He comes to this understanding
of primordial being according to his own lights, but once again
in a cultural context that includes religious as well as literary
frames of reference.
Most important, Winnicott expresses the idea that “thou
art my bone and my flesh” (Gen. 29.14) in terms of the devo-
tion of being with one another at the origin. He describes how
the mother, at the very beginning of the infant’s life, becomes
“preoccupied” to the extent that “she is the baby and the baby
is her” (1987, 6). Dwelling emerges out of this nonrelational
being with one another at the origin.
More explicitly, I believe, than any of his analytic contempo-
raries, Winnicott sets out the foundations for a general theory
of dwelling, in which the ontology of object relations is coupled
with a topographical understanding of internal and external
 Steven Groarke 421

reality. With respect to the topography of primitive emotional

development, Winnicott argues first that the maternal body
occupies the primordial position for the infant, and, second,
that the mother provides the infant with a series of intimate
experiences ranging in value from good (facilitative) to bad
(impinging). The fundamental distinction that Winnicott
makes between reliability and unreliability is organized around
the mother’s capacity—or otherwise—to meet the infant’s de-
veloping needs, which is largely a matter of what bodies can
and cannot do together as they begin to make contact. The
experience of being in common is expressed along these lines
as a corporeal sense of well-being, a sense of being in one’s
own skin but always in the company of somebody.
On the basis of an original set-up or locus, Winnicott
(1962) describes how the ego is integrated into a “unit” and
develops as the “core of the personality,” precisely on condition
that “the actual mother” is in a position to “meet the absolute
dependence of the actual infant at the beginning” (56–57).
In this case, a sense of ontological security arises on account
of “the human reliability of the holding and the handling”
(1987, 97).
The situation of sensible beings one with another demar-
cates both a place of being and, under adverse conditions, its
fragmentation. In Winnicott’s account of the fragmentation of
being, the encrypted “memories” of disaster are lodged in the
shell rather than the core of being. The interruption of the
continuity of being is coupled with a disaster that takes place
in the margins of being, the psychic expression of which may
be seen in the form of a “hidden” or “false” self. Didier Anzieu
(1985) clarifies this disastrous situation from a topographical
point of view: “Encircled and sealed off by a permanent counter-
cathexis, the pain of the traumatic breach subsists in the form
of unconscious psychical suffering, localized and encysted at
the periphery of the self” (214).
Thus, instead of a condition in which the beginning of
life is espoused by devotion and accompanied by a primary
state of nonintegration, the place of being becomes no more
than an empty container, if not a lifeless relic of the original
mother-infant arrangement. In Winnicott’s account of original
failure, disaster renders life inwardly void (I am nothing)—once
422 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

again a mere semblance of being and world that threatens to

annihilate the psychological life of the infant.
In attempting to put things into words in the aftermath
of disaster, a patient related that, on leaving her session the
previous day, she had felt like a big black cloud of smoke. The
cloud got worse during the course of her journey home until
it became a horrible, thick magma that gave off a revolting
stench. She likened it to the smoke coming off the grill over
an open fire coupled with the smell of burning charcoal. The
patient hated her neighbors having barbecues in the summer;
the smell as well as the neighbors themselves disgusted her.
There was a murderous depth to her hatred, and identifying
herself with the word stench, which figured in the crossword
she had used to distract herself on the way home the previous
evening, she associated the cloud to thoughts she had been
having in recent sessions about Auschwitz and suicide.
Most important, the patient wanted me to understand that
she did not see herself as a “victim” of this stench. “It isn’t some-
thing outside,” she said, “that is threatening to invade me. It is
me. I am it.” The cloud may be seen, among other things, as a
fragment of being in place of the patient’s being in the world.
Looming up for her neither from the inside nor the outside,
the cloud appears as a lifeless remainder or remnant of the “I
am.” As such, it forms a “second skin” (Bick 1968) out of the
olfactory envelope that lines the “primal skin” or le moi-peau,
insofar as the latter is not sufficiently developed in this case “to
fulfil its functions of establishing contacts, filtering exchanges
and registering communications” (Anzieu 1985, 196).
The patient responded to my saying that she experienced
herself as a kind of toxic Auschwitz machine by insisting that
it would be better if I, too, were a machine. She believed that
machines could not be soiled, and said that if we were both
machines she would not damage me with her disgusting stench,
and therefore I would have no cause to retaliate in order to
rid myself of the awful smell she took herself to be.
It is important when approaching these kinds of experi-
ences to understand that the environment is not seen as the
sole determinant of emotional life. Winnicott does not reduce
things to a sociological account of emotions. Rather, he allows
for a relation between environment and endowment, where
 Steven Groarke 423

the former either nourishes or fails innate tendencies toward

creative living. Nevertheless, it is the world itself that fails at
the origin in Winnicott’s account of disaster; he describes how
the world fails the infant as world.
The figure of home and what is meant by home are es-
sential for Winnicott. His understanding of home as the original
dwelling of being suggests something more than a place that
merely belongs to the world. The place where we live is, at once,
personal, ancestral, and sacral. Accordingly, the Winnicottian
picture of home, our native place, describes how it is that the
world comes to be experienced as real by an individual who,
in turn, embodies a sense of realness. Home, in other words,
is understood in terms of the very grounds of life, the failure
of which is therefore a catastrophe pertaining to our being in
the world.

The loss of being at the origin leaves the infant between

times, in the parentheses of being, but also exposed to the un-
thinkable experience of boundless territory. With the disaster
of a world under erasure at the beginning, the infant has no-
where to turn for shelter, or any sense at all of being oriented
that might give some relief. Feelings of falling apart and being
psychically broken up or deformed are placed alongside the
loss of orientation and the lack of “relationship to the body”
(Winnicott 1962, 58). Where the center of gravity of being at
the origin is dislocated due to environmental failure, the in-
fant becomes a stranger even to himself and in his own mind.
Experience is rendered disastrous by the kind of anxiety that
cannot be thought about; there is no shelter in the face of
disaster but only an empty shell.
In Winnicott’s account of fragmentation, being effectively
becomes errant wandering amid a boundless world, where the
infant finds himself to begin with “on the brink of unthink-
able anxiety,” continually exposed to the terrible paradox of
being without dwelling, or feeling, as John Clare did, “home-
less at home” (qtd. in Bate 2003, 4). The patient I described
above whose wandering becomes a disgusting black cloud is
424 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

no longer the subject of her own loneliness. For her, it is not

a case of feeling lonely in a constituted world (“I am lonely”).
Rather, the black cloud is all that remains of self and world
(“It is me. I am it”).
It may be that as adults we are never quite at home again,
but to begin with the infant has to come into his or her own
skin in order to feel fully alive. Winnicott (1974) links the
anxieties pertaining to the fundamental sense of homelessness
at the beginning to specific defense mechanisms including
disintegration, self-holding and depersonalization, the recourse
to narcissism, and autistic states. In each case, the aspiration
to preserve oneself in being is thwarted, although Winnicott
concludes that “psychotic illness” is not a breakdown, but “a
defence organisation relative to a primitive agony” (90).
Unlike Freud (1911), who saw psychotic symptoms (delu-
sions and hallucinations) as restitutive, Winnicott holds that
psychosis itself is a defense: “What we see clinically is always
a defence organization, even in the autism of childhood
schizophrenia” (1974, 90). It is a mistake, then, according to
Winnicott, to view psychotic illness as a breakdown, and the
idea that it is actually a defense helps to explain the paradox
“that what is not yet experienced did nevertheless happen in
the past” (1974, 91). The strangeness of the world as world ap-
pears in Winnicottian space, precisely where the unthinkable
is experienced as a defense against disaster.
It is the mechanisms of defense that reveal the extent to
which disaster is at once a temporal and a spatial phenomenon.
The time of disaster, the paradox of which presupposes a past
that was never present, takes place in the parentheses of being.
The continuity of being is put on hold only to the extent that
original failure comes to pass at the level of environmental
space. Without the place of disaster, the experience that so far
remains unthinkable for the traumatized infant would simply
bypass itself; there would be no hope at all of being in the world.
If being comes back to itself as imagined resurrection, it does
so at the interface of aboriginal expectation and encapsulated
memory. The latter is a spatial phenomenon that, as such, pro-
vides grounds for hope. For Winnicott, there is something to
look forward to in the aftermath of disaster only to the extent
 Steven Groarke 425

that the defensive maneuver at the beginning encloses the

“situation” that the infant defends itself against.
As with the redemption of time, the idea that estrange-
ment looms up amid the empty semblance of being, that the
hidden self is subject to the mere outward appearance of being
in the world, links Winnicott’s clinical thinking to literary and
biblical modes of imagining. Again, the debt to Eliot and his
late Christian poetry, especially the Four Quartets, is evident in
Winnicott’s dialectic of disaster and hope.
First, and most important perhaps, Winnicott follows
Eliot—as Eliot follows Pascal from his 1931 introduction to the
Pensées through “Burnt Norton”—in keeping faith with hope
not as a doctrinal precept so much as a lived feeling. The use
of faith in both cases renders hope as a structure of feeling.
Second, as doubt and uncertainty for Eliot “are merely a va-
riety of belief” (1927, 15), Winnicott similarly construes the
relationship between disaster and hope in dialectical terms,
so that hope proceeds from the place of disaster, well-being
from the fragmentation of being. Third, although they do not
necessarily agree about the translation of guilt into the category
of original sin, Winnicott shares Eliot’s faith in a purgatorial
process that bestows meaning even on the most unthinkable
suffering or primitive agonies.
For Eliot, the theology of Purgatory provides grounds for
hope: “The souls in [Dante’s] purgatory suffer because they
wish to suffer, for purgation. And observe that they suffer more
actively and keenly, being souls preparing for blessedness, than
Virgil suffers in eternal limbo. In their suffering is hope, in
the anaesthesia of Virgil is hopelessness; that is the difference”
(1929, 256). Eliot reads Dante against the finality of oblivion
in the Virgilian underworld, against the fate of forgetfulness
that, as Anchises informs his son, awaits the souls summoned to
drink the waters of Lethe (Aeneid VI, 956–59). At the interface
of the Latin letum (“death”) and Greek lethe (“forgetfulness”),
Eliot pits hope against Virgil’s version of Plato’s “River of Indif-
ference,” turning Virgil’s “without memory” (immemores) into
the transcendent truth of “non-forgetfulness” (aletheia). The
“wish to suffer,” rather than simply being in pain or remain-
ing oblivious forever, is the means by which the soul may be
426 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

restored in “Little Gidding,” where “The only hope, or else

despair / Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre / To be redeemed
from fire to fire” (ll. 207–9). This is how Eliot would have us
keep helplessness on this side of hopelessness. Compare Canto
26 of Purgatorio: “Then, maybe giving place to one behind, /
He vanished through the flames now he had done, / As fish
dive to the mud and leave us blind” (ll. 133–35).
Winnicott, for his part, makes of this purgatorial process a
reliving out of the disaster of being, and no less an act of faith
than Eliot’s poetry. There is terrible loss in the wake of early
trauma that can never be recouped, in which case imagination
itself becomes memory. Thus, fundamentally dependent as I
believe his thinking is on the “redress of poetry,” Winnicott
does not succumb to nihilism in the face of the unthinkable,
any more than Eliot does in his thought of hell after Dante—
namely, as the “torment” that “issues from the very nature of
the damned themselves” (1929, 255). Winnicott confirms that,
compelled as we are by primitive agonies, our imagination is
nonetheless subject to the creative impulse of being and, as
such, proceeds inexorably toward nonforgetfulness, even as
Eliot’s “dry concrete, brown edged” pool is filled with “water
out of sunlight” and raised up “out of heart of light” (“Burnt
Norton,” ll. 36–37).
There is, of course, another side to Winnicott’s thinking
in which the intuition of transcendence is aimed at its vocation
of care. The psychoanalytic task is not confined to the “surface
glittered out of heart of light” (“Burnt Norton,” l. 39) on the
model of Eliot’s reconciliation of essence and existence. I came
to the same conclusion in my discussion of Winnicott’s account
of time and being. The articulation of hope and space is at
once an ontological and a therapeutic argument. Winnicott’s
singular account of the fragmentation of being augments the
therapeutic aspects of regression as part of the care of the self.
In this case, Winnicott applies the technique of reliving, under-
stood as the equivalent of remembering, to the unthinkable
experience of encapsulated or encrypted trauma. The trans-
formation of unthinkable anxiety into imagined resurrections
presupposes not only that the disaster “has already been,” but
 Steven Groarke 427

also that it is “carried round hidden away in the unconscious”

(1974, 90).
Again, the spatial and temporal determinations of being
are equally important. Memory itself is put on hold, together
with the “freezing” of original failure, in the very interstices of
disaster, and it is the encapsulation of the latter that provides a
surface of emergence for the subsequent reliving of unthink-
able experience.
To summarize, Winnicott describes disaster as a phenom-
enon of environmental failure, involving a deficient type of
maternal care. He describes the traumatic effect this has on
the infant in terms of the loss of being, where the ongoing
sense of continuity is displaced by reaction to impingement.
The “having been” of the place of being becomes “unthink-
able” for an infant who is described as falling between times,
even as he or she feels psychologically fragmented. Cast into a
boundless world, with no relationship to his or her own body,
the infant therefore lacks any sense of direction or orientation.
Movement itself is overwhelmed by the feeling of falling forever,
an infinite anguish in excess of the continuity of life.
This is essentially how Winnicott describes the emotional
world of early trauma, in the face of which he nonetheless
posits a tenacious belief in the world. For Winnicott, the origi-
nal thread of experience is kept alive beyond memory in the
belief that something worthwhile may yet be found, and not
everything that is believed to be worthwhile finds its way into
words. I have described this belief in terms of the remnants of
the immemorial past, on the one hand, and the encapsulation
of early trauma, on the other. Fidelity to failure, to borrow
Beckett’s phrase, allows for a renewed experience whereby
the original failure is relived in a reliable context. The use
of faith as reliving, where faith becomes imagination in the
face of primitive anxiety, is set out along therapeutic lines as
regression to dependence. Winnicott therefore includes the
affirmation of resurrection as part of the ontology of disaster
and hope, an affirmation that extends to exaltation, a euphoric
sense of being, on the model of biblical modes of imagining.
While remaining fully aware of the deep paradoxes of being,
428 Winnicott’s Ontology of Disaster and Hope

Winnicott engages the biblical presence, most notably in Eliot,

as an authentic inspiration for clinical thinking.
Department of Social Sciences
Southlands College
Roehampton University
80 Roehampton Lane
London SW15 5SL
England
S.Groarke@roehampton.ac.uk

Note
1. All quotations from Eliot’s poetry are from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S.
Eliot (1969).

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