Reflecting on what Donald Winnicott found from studying infant development.

Recently, I was reading a passage by the mid-twentieth-century paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott that made me think rather differently about God. Winnicott was interested in how we become ourselves. Not simply how we develop a personality, but something more fundamental: how we come to experience ourselves as real, living in a world inhabited by other people who exist independently of us. 

Succinctly—how the self becomes.

His answer was surprising. It seems that in order to discover the reality of someone we love, we may first need to try to destroy them. It sounds alarming, but bear with me.

The Infant Who Thinks It Is God

Winnicott—profoundly influenced by his supervisor, Melanie Klein—believed that an infant begins life without a clear distinction between itself and the world. The baby experiences hunger, and food appears; it experiences discomfort, and someone responds. At first, there is no fully developed sense of a separate person providing these things. The infant inhabits a world of near-omnipotence, in which its wishes and the responses of its surroundings are not yet clearly distinguished.

Gradually, of course, reality intrudes. The mother does not always appear immediately. She is not simply an extension of the infant’s wishes; she has needs of her own. This establishes the mother as both “good” (when present) and “bad” (when withdrawn).

And this is where Winnicott introduces his rather startling idea of destruction. In unconscious fantasy, the infant seeks to destroy the object of its dependence as a test of its capacity to be held. Crucially, the mother survives. She does not disappear, retaliate, or withdraw her love. Through this experience, the infant begins to discover something extraordinary: the mother exists independently of its own wishes and fantasies.

She is real. And because she is real, the relationship can become real, too.

In his 1969 paper The Use of an Object, Winnicott describes this imagined discovery:

“The object is first made real through aggressive destruction; and this of course, makes experience of the object feel real to the self… The subject says to the object: ‘I have destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo, object! I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.'”

Winnicott called the nurturing context that makes this development possible the “holding environment.” His famous idea of the “good-enough mother” was not about perfect parenting. Quite the opposite. It was about providing enough security, responsiveness, and continuity for the child to gradually encounter a world that does not simply conform to its wishes.

The important point is that the child does not discover itself in isolation. We do not become ourselves alone. The self becomes real through its encounter with another who is also real.

Creating and Destroying the Parental God

If this is how we mature psychologically, perhaps it is also how we mature spiritually.

Consider our cultural conception of the divine. We—Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike—have largely created an archetypal father figure; a parental deity whom many now revile. But maybe this is a necessary stage. As we seek revelation, perhaps we must first create, and then attempt to destroy, God in the image of a parent.

Other religious traditions have long explored conceptions of ultimate reality that do not depend upon the image of a parental deity. Hindu philosophical traditions, for example, include understandings of Brahman as the ultimate reality underlying existence, sometimes understood as beyond all personal attributes and distinctions. While Hinduism also has rich traditions of personal devotion, its philosophical diversity reminds us that the Western image of God as an authoritative father is not the only possible way of approaching the sacred.

Isn’t it probable that God is not male, or parental at all? Perhaps what matters is not whether God is male or female, parental or impersonal, but that we are connected. Being of one substance. A part, yet apart.

Finding that God is still there, patiently loving, surviving our destruction—it is then that we can relax into acceptance.

Awakening to Existential Love

The most important question is whether we are capable of encountering a reality that does not simply reflect ourselves. That is a question of spirituality, but it is also a question of psychological maturity.

Can we love another person without needing them to become what we want? Can we accept a world that exceeds our understanding and control? And can we allow our most cherished beliefs to be challenged without assuming that everything they were trying to express must therefore disappear?

I find myself returning to Winnicott’s extraordinary image of the infant who destroys the mother in fantasy, only to discover that she is still there. It is through the mother’s survival that she becomes real to the child.

Perhaps in this age of materialism and the repudiation of the divine, we stand on the threshold of awakening to existential love. A love that survives our destruction.