Winnicott and the capacity to believe

Like Freud's, Winnicott's writing displays an enormous interest in words, in their histories as well as their current usage. The author discusses his use of two words, 'capacity' and 'belief' combined in the phrase 'capacity to believe'. What Winnicott has to say about this capacity sheds light on the nature of both religious and cultural experience generally. The paper's argument has two strands that are woven together throughout. The first is Winnicott's concern for words and how a knowledge of their roots can enrich their current meaning. The second is his concern for the nature of belief, the 'capacity to believe', and his conviction that in exploring this capacity psychoanalysis might have something to teach religion. These concerns are interrelated in a number of ways in Winnicott's writing and are ultimately connected with his notion of a 'cultural field', a place to grow, where 'inventiveness', even verbal inventiveness, is 'just one more example ... of the interplay between separateness and union', that is the separateness of individual language users but also their union through the language they share.