ABSTRACT
Winnicott, Lacan, and Bion have attempted sophisticated and intensive depth phenomenologies of faith in travail. In Winnicott, the area of faith is expressed in his descriptions of transitional experiencing, and taken forward in his later work on object usage. Since much work has already been published on transitional experiencing, the author's main concern will be with object usage. The area of faith in Winnicott's transitional experiencing and object usage may be brought out more clearly by contrasting it, as Winnicott himself has done, with the Kleinian introjective–projective fantasy world. Winnicott situates transitional experiencing between the early emergence of consciousness and the infant's growing awareness of otherness outside himself. In the transitional area self and other are neither one, nor two, but somehow together make up an interpenetrating field. Winnicott contrasts transitional experiencing with object relating through projective–introjective operations by a unit self.
