ABSTRACT
The middle of the twentieth century saw a beginning shift in the way that the Christian narrative became woven into psychoanalytic thought. The complementarity between religion and psychoanalysis that had existed since Freud encountered its own quiet negation by theorists whom I detailed in Chapter 4, though two stand as exemplars: W. R. D. Fairbairn and D. W. Winnicott. Influenced since childhood by the Christian narrative, Fairbairn and Winnicott did much to “use” it to great benefit for the psychoanalytic community, surrendering to an embrace of both psychoanalysis and the Christian narrative through the “third” of relationality. I will explore the role of religious narratives in the lives of these two theorists, whose work ultimately contributed to tectonic shifts in the geography of psychoanalysis.
