Winnicott with Lacan: Living Creatively in a Postmodern

World
Mari Ruti

American Imago, Volume 67, Number 3, Fall 2010, pp. 353-374 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/aim.2010.0016

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aim/summary/v067/67.3.ruti.html

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 Mari Ruti 353

MARI RUTI

Winnicott with Lacan:

Living Creatively in a Postmodern World
“To be creative a person must exist and have a feeling of
existing, not in conscious awareness, but as a basic place
to operate from. Creativity is then the doing that arises out
of being. It indicates that he who is, is alive.”
—D. W. Winnicott, “Living Creatively”

This article asks what it might mean to live resourcefully in the

contemporary cultural moment, one characterized by multiple demands
on our time and attention, an accelerated and overstimulating pace of
life, and an increasing fragmentation of psychic and affective space.
Bringing Winnicott into conversation with Lacan, the author argues
that, despite their obvious differences, both psychoanalytic theorists view
excessive psychic integration as an impediment to creativity. More specifi-
cally, the Winnicottian notion of the False Self is held to be conceptually
quite similar to what Lacan means by an ego-bound self that is unable
to overcome its narcissistic fantasies of coherence and wholeness. The
article reveals that Winnicott and Lacan help us understand that
creative living entails accepting existential insecurity as an intrinsic
component of “the human condition.” Yet it also highlights the limits
of this perspective by acknowledging that there are instances where in-
security arises from oppressive sociocultural circumstances rather than
from the “universal” complexities of human life. The aim, in short, is
to demonstrate that existential instability and precariousness are the
flipside of creativity, without at the same time turning these concepts
into a fetish for postmodern subjectivity.

Creative Living

D. W. Winnicott’s definition of creativity as a matter of feel-

ing alive is deceptively simple. If all that creativity requires is an
awareness of existing—and if this awareness does not even have

American Imago, Vol. 67, No. 3, 353–374. © 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

353
354 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

to be conscious or self-reflexive but merely entails an intuitive

sense of having a subjective base to operate from—how could
we not be creative? Yet Winnicott implies that many of us do
not feel sufficiently alive to realize our potential for what he
calls creative living. Or is the problem perhaps that we do not
feel alive in the right way? Are there ways of feeling alive that
contribute to creative living and others that, though giving us
the semblance of a full and vibrant life, in fact frustrate our
creativity?
It seems to me that those of us living in the postmodern
era are uniquely qualified to ponder this question, for argu-
ably it is one of the hallmarks of postmodernity to make us
feel frantically alive—harried, agitated, and overstimulated—
while simultaneously leaving us feeling psychically empty and
impoverished. Postmodernity, in other words, adds a new di-
mension to Winnicott’s definition of creativity by highlighting
that aliveness comes in various forms and that not all of these
forms are equally conducive to psychic well-being.
My objective in this article is to think about what it might
mean to live creatively in the postmodern world. I will do this
by bringing Winnicott into conversation with Jacques Lacan—a
strategy that might appear somewhat surprising in light of the
fact that these two thinkers are usually thought to inhabit op-
posite ends of the psychoanalytic spectrum. While Winnicott
promotes the notion of a True Self that contains the subject’s
creative potentialities, Lacan insists that the very idea of a “true”
self is an unfortunate and misleading illusion. While Winnicott
associates inner growth and development with increasing psy-
chic integration, Lacan presents us with a theory of foundational
lack and alienation. And while Winnicott recognizes the needs
of the ego in the face of environmental insufficiencies, Lacan
posits that all schemas that cater to the ego’s demands are
intrinsically counterproductive because they draw the subject
into the kinds of narcissistic fantasy formations that lead it to
look for the meaning of its existence in all the wrong places.
There are therefore good reasons to think that the divide
between Winnicott and Lacan cannot be productively traversed.
Nonetheless, I would like to illustrate that some of the key dif-
ferences between these two thinkers are more apparent than
real. And I would like to do this by showing that both talk
 Mari Ruti 355

about creativity in ways that are relevant to the postmodern

cultural moment.
I should say right away that my aim is not to turn Lacan
into a relational analyst (which would be impossible) or to
turn Winnicott into a (post)structuralist (which would be
equally impossible). However, I think that it is safe to argue
that while the notion of creative living is usually associated with
Winnicott, it is also something that can be found in Lacanian
theory, albeit in a very different form. Similarly, I think that it
is safe to say that while Lacan is celebrated for giving us one
of the first genuinely nonessentialist theories of subjectivity,
Winnicott, in his own way, is also quite interested in fluid and
open-ended subjectivity.
The stakes of bringing Winnicott and Lacan together are
much larger than merely outlining where their theories might
intersect. I engage in this exercise in part to counter the idea
that poststructuralist (constructivist) theories of subjectivity and
psychic life are better at explaining the bleak facts of constitutive
lack, alienation, and disenchantment than they are at offering
constructive solutions to the contemporary subject’s existential
predicament. While it is the case, as Peter Rudnytsky (1991)
suggests, that constructivist thinkers frequently posit the crisis
phenomena of subjective fragmentation and decentering as
paradigmatic of subjectivity as such, I would say that they do so
not in order to promote a nihilistic notion of what it means to
be a human being, but rather to invite us to rethink the meaning
of concepts such as agency, creativity, and psychic potentiality.
After all, the fact that the self is socially constituted rather than
essential—that it is reflective of its placement in a specific so-
ciohistorical setting rather than of a fixed metaphysical kernel
of being—does not extinguish its desire for a meaningful life.
On this view, questions about the best way to go about our lives,
to sustain a robust sense of personal existence, or to cultivate
rewarding relationships do not carry any less weight now than
they did prior to the inception of poststructuralism. It is just
that the answers are likely to be different from those advanced
by more traditional philosophies.
My hope is that considering Winnicott with Lacan will
deepen our understanding of the fact that the lack of secure
ontological foundations—a condition taken for granted by most
356 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

constructivist critics—does not necessarily prevent the subject

from living creatively in the Winnicottian sense. As a matter
of fact, I would like to propose that Winnicott, no less than
Lacan, suggests that an overvaluation of psychic coherence
may stifle creativity. At the same time, I would like to specify
right away that I am not interested in fetishizing existential
instability in the manner that has become customary in much
of poststructuralist theory. I do not think that the lack of stabil-
ity in itself is necessarily either liberatory or subversive. And I
believe that there are kinds of instability—due, for instance,
to extreme forms of social and/or interpersonal trauma—that
make it very difficult for individuals to survive, let alone access
creativity. My goal here is thus not to celebrate insecurity for
its own sake, but rather to ask how we can productively cope
with it, living, as we do, in a cultural moment when many of
us find it an inescapable reality.

Lacan and Psychic Potentiality

Let us consider Lacan first.1 As we know, Lacan’s theory of

subject formation is premised on the notion of foundational
lack or alienation. The transition from the Imaginary to the
Symbolic—from preoedipal drives to the collective social space
of signification and meaning production—is, for Lacan, a
process of primordial wounding in the sense that the subject
is gradually brought face to face with its own lack. While the
internalization of the signifier brings the subject into existence
as a creature of desire (thereby giving it access to a fully “human”
existence), it simultaneously reveals that the surrounding world
is much larger and more powerful than any individual subject
could ever be—that the self is always merely a minor participant
in a system of signification that operates quite independently of
its “private” passions and preoccupations. In this manner, the
signifier shatters the fantasies of omnipotence and wholeness
that characterize the emerging ego of the mirror stage. One
could, then, say that, in the Lacanian scenario, we purchase
our social subjectivity at the price of narcissistic injury in the
sense that we become culturally intelligible beings only insofar
as we learn to love ourselves a bit less.
 Mari Ruti 357

It is worth noting right away that one of the things that

drives a wedge between Lacan and Winnicott is that while
Winnicott regards the ego as what allows the subject to enter
into an increasingly complex relationship to the world, Lacan
associates it primarily with narcissistic and overconfident fan-
tasies that lend an illusory consistency to the subject’s psychic
life. Lacan explains that the subject’s realization that it is not
synonymous with the world, but rather a frail and faltering
creature that needs continuously to negotiate its position in the
world, introduces an apprehensive state of want and restless-
ness that it finds difficult to tolerate and that it consequently
endeavors to cover over by fantasy formations. In other words,
because lack is devastating to admit to—because the subject
experiences it as a debilitating wound—it is disposed to seek
solace in fantasies that allow it to mask and ignore the reality
of this lack. Such fantasies alleviate anxiety and fend off the
threat of fragmentation because they enable the subject to
consider itself as more unified and complete than it actually
is; by concealing the traumatic split, tear, or rift within the
subject’s psychic life, they render its identity (seemingly) reli-
able and immediately readable. As a result, they all too easily
lead the subject to believe that it can come to know itself in a
definitive fashion, thereby preventing it from recognizing that
“knowing” one version of itself may well function as a defense
against other, perhaps less reassuring, versions.
One consequence of the subject’s dependence on such ego-
gratifying fantasies is that they mislead it to seek self-fulfillment
through the famous objet petit a—the object cause of desire that
the subject believes will return to it the precious sense of whole-
ness that it imagines having lost.2 In this scenario, the subject
searches for meaning outside of itself, in an object of desire
that seems to contain the enigmatic objet a. Lacan’s goal, in this
context, is to enable the subject to perceive that this fantasmatic
quest for secure foundations is a waste of its psychic energies.
His aim is to convince the subject that the objet a will never give
it the meaning of its existence, but will, instead, lead it down
an ever-widening spiral of existential deadends.
How, then, does the Lacanian subject find meaning in
its life? Lacan’s answer is that it is only by accepting lack as a
precondition of its existence—by welcoming and embracing the
358 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

primordial wound inflicted by the signifier—that the subject

can begin to weave the threads of its life into an existentially
evocative tapestry. It is, in other words, only by exchanging its
ego for language, its narcissistic fantasies for the meaning mak-
ing capacities of the signifier, that the subject can begin to ask
constructive questions about its life.3 For Lacan, there are of
course no definitive answers to these questions. But this does
not lessen the value of being able to ask them. The fact that
there is no stable truth of being does not prevent the subject
from actively and imaginatively participating in the production
of meaning.
Lacan implies that it is precisely because the subject can
never attain the truth of its being—because it can never achieve
a state of transparent wholeness—that it is driven to look for
substitutes that might compensate for its sense of lack; it is
motivated to invent figures of meaning that can, momentarily
at least, ease and contain the discomfort of alienation. In this
paradoxical sense, rather than robbing the subject of its in-
ner richness, lack is the underpinning of everything that is
potentially innovative about human life.4 Indeed, it is possible
to envision the intricate productions and fabrications of the
human psyche as vehicles through which the foundational lack
of existence assumes a positive and tangible form. This in turn
suggests that the subject’s ability to dwell within lack without
seeking to close it is indispensable for its psychic vitality. As a
matter of fact, such dwelling within lack could be argued to
be the greatest of human achievements, for it transforms the
terrors and midnights of the spirit into symbolic formations,
imaginative undertakings, and sites of delicate beauty that make
the world the absorbing and spellbinding place that it—in its
most auspicious moments at least—can be.
It is thus because the subject lacks that it is prompted to
create, and it is through its creative activity that it manages, in
an always necessarily precarious manner, to withstand its lack.
In this context, it is important to specify that the translation of
lack into creativity is not a matter of dialectical redemption in
the sense of giving the subject the ability to turn negativity into
a definitive form of positivity. The subject’s attempts to name
its lack are transient at best, giving it access to no permanent
meaning, no solid identity, no unitary narrative of subjective
 Mari Ruti 359

constitution. Any fleeting state of fullness or positivity that the

subject may be able to attain must always in the end dissolve
back into negativity; any endeavor to erase lack only gives rise
to new instances of lack. This implies that the process of filling
lack must by necessity be continually renewed. It cannot be
brought to an end for the simple reason that the subject can
never forge an object or a representation that would once and
for all seal this lack. However, far from being a hindrance to
existential vitality, this intrinsic impossibility—the fact that every
attempt to redeem lack unavoidably falls short of its mark—is
what allows us, over and again, to take up the endless process
of signification. From this point of view, lack serves as a fertile
kind of emptiness that keeps our subjectivities mobile.
Lacan’s rendering of the subject’s relation to the signifier
is therefore complex in the sense that although he consistently
accentuates the subject’s relative helplessness vis-à-vis the larger
systems of signification that envelop it, he at the same time sug-
gests that it is only by virtue of its membership in the Symbolic
order that the subject possesses the capacity to make meaning in
the first place. The Symbolic, in other words, is not merely (or
even primarily) a hegemonic structure that coerces the subject
into its law, but also—as I have endeavored to illustrate—the
foundation of its creative potentialities. Lacan in fact insists
that though the subject can never master the signifier—let
alone the signified—it enjoys a certain degree of imaginative
leeway with respect to the signifier. He describes this imagina-
tive leeway as the subject’s capacity to make use of the “poetic
function” of language (1953, 264)—the fact that language by
definition perpetuates the radical slipperiness, multiplicity,
and polyvalence of meaning. In the same way that Heidegger
(1971) connects creativity to the individual’s ability to dwell
in the world in poetic rather than merely instrumental ways,
Lacan envisions creativity in terms of the subject’s capacity
to take a poetic approach to the world—an approach that is
content to play with meaning without attempting to arrest it
in unequivocal or transparent definitions.
The fact that (the early) Lacan views the subject’s main
existential task to be to come to terms with its lack explains in
part why he tends to be so brutally dismissive of ego psychol-
ogy. If Lacan criticizes the attempts of ego psychologists to
360 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

shore up the subject’s ego, it is because he believes that they

have gotten things entirely backwards: instead of helping the
subject accept lack as constitutive of subjectivity, they intensify
its existential confusion by reinforcing its narcissistic fanta-
sies. Lacan contends that such an approach is fundamentally
flawed in the sense that it hastens to close prematurely the void
within the subject’s being rather than to foster the psychic and
creative possibilities that arise from its capacity to experience
this void. It promises the end of alienation instead of teach-
ing the subject to live resourcefully with this alienation. Such
a promise, Lacan suggests, is always deceptive and hollow, in
the final analysis leaving the subject worse off than before. The
“solution” that ego psychology offers to the subject’s sense of
lack is therefore, for Lacan, merely the highest manifestation
of the problem. It impedes, rather than advances, the subject’s
potential for creative living.

Winnicott and Existential Authenticity

Creativity—and the capacity for creative living—is, for La-

can, thus a function of lack. Winnicott, in contrast, theorizes
creativity as an attribute of a certain kind of existential fullness,
of the self’s ability to remain true to itself. It is this word “true”
that has historically made it difficult for constructivist thinkers
to appreciate Winnicott’s version of psychoanalysis because it
immediately conjures up the image of an essential self. And
indeed, there is little doubt that what Winnicott means by the
True Self constitutes a certain kind of essentialism. He con-
nects the True Self to what he calls the infant’s “spontaneous
gesture”—an innate creative capacity that characterizes human
life from its inception. As Winnicott observes, “The spontane-
ous gesture is the True Self in action. Only the True Self can
be creative and only the True Self can feel real” (1960, 148).
Winnicott maintains that the spontaneous gesture is linked
to the infant’s sense of bodily aliveness. It enables the infant to
reach out to the world with a degree of agility. In this manner, it
generates the preconditions for the emergence of the psyche as
a form of mental organization that is capable of creatively and
resourcefully interacting with its surroundings. For Winnicott,
 Mari Ruti 361

the psyche thus comes into being as a kind of extension—or

enunciation—of bodily aliveness. In this sense, the Winnicottian
True Self as a site of spontaneous bodily energy is “essential”
in the same way that the Freudian drives or Nietzsche’s will to
power are essential. It represents a primary force that makes
life, including psychic life, possible.
This manner of formulating the issue may help explain
why the Winnicottian True Self is actually in many ways the
very antithesis of what constructivist thinkers mean when they
talk about a fixed essential self. Winnicott asserts that there
is “little point in formulating a True Self idea except for the
purpose of trying to understand the False Self, because it does
no more than collect together the details of the experience
of aliveness” (1960, 148). The True Self thus has no fixed
content beyond the fact that it articulates the subject’s sense
of aliveness. It relates to the subject’s spontaneous gesture,
but it does not in any way dictate the shape or direction of
this gesture. As Adam Phillips remarks, the True Self “cannot
strictly speaking be defined because it covers what is distinctive
and original about each person. It is simply a category for the
idiosyncratic” (1988, 135).
On the most basic level, Winnicott connects the True Self
to the subject’s capacity to fend off states of psychic rigidity and
to experience itself as a creature of potentiality. I use the word
potentiality here in a loosely phenomenological sense. I like to
think of Winnicott’s notion of creative living as a psychoanalytic
answer to the phenomenological problematic of self-actual-
ization. In the phenomenological context, potentiality is not
some predetermined or definable entity, but rather a charac-
teristic of a self that is always in the process of becoming—that
is always in the process of inquiring into the parameters and
possibilities of its existence. The phenomenological self thus
realizes its potential to the extent that it refuses to settle into a
specific conception of what it means to be a human being. In
this sense, self-actualization has nothing to do with discovering
the fixed essence of one’s being, but rather with feeding the
spark that makes continuous self-renewal possible. Winnicott,
I would maintain, has an idea similar to this one about what
it means to fulfill one’s potential—what it means to live in the
world in creative ways.
362 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

Like the so-called “authentic” self of phenomenology, the

Winnicottian True Self holds itself open to constant reconfigu-
ration. The False Self, in contrast, is immobilized into a dead
psychic organization that closes off the future. It is defensive
and largely incapable of growth and transformation. Having
exhausted its sense of aliveness, it has lost its capacity to pursue
its potential. In the severe case, Winnicott explains, “all that
is real and all that matters and all that is personal and origi-
nal and creative is hidden, and gives no sign of its existence”
(1971a, 68). In such instances, Winnicott specifies, “the False
Self sets up as real and it is this that observers tend to think is
the real person.” Such a self may function quite effectively on
many levels of daily existence. However, it begins to falter when
it is confronted by what Winnicott calls “living relationships”—
“situations in which what is expected is a whole person” (1960,
142). The False Self therefore fails to convince in relationships
and situations that presuppose a depth and versatility of being.
It has lost its ability to meet the complexities of the world in
supple and adventurous ways. And it has lost its capacity to be
at ease with itself.
Because the False Self has lost its inner elasticity, it finds it
difficult to deal with the more unpredictable aspects of life. This
is in many ways akin to what Freud describes as the kind of fix-
ity of libidinal energy that leads to the formation of symptoms.
A symptom indicates, among other things, that something in
the subject’s psychic life has become stuck or jammed—that
something interferes with the flow of inner energy. Conse-
quently, if the subject falls into self-undermining patterns of
predictable behavior—the Freudian repetition compulsion—it
is because it is unable to break out of circuits of energy that
have over time solidified into stubbornly inflexible patterns.
Its psychic energies accumulate and get trapped in symptoms,
with the result that these energies remain unavailable for more
creative endeavors. In this way, symptoms deplete the subject’s
inner life and extinguish its creative potential. Likewise, the
Winnicottian False Self tends to be caught in its own suffering
in the sense that it cannot escape the narrow parameters that
it has (unconsciously) set for its existence.
Winnicott stresses that the False Self is an inherently com-
pliant self—a self that passively reacts to the world rather than
 Mari Ruti 363

being able to interact dynamically with, or shape, the world.

Although a degree of social conformity is a necessary part of
human existence in the sense that we cannot live independently
of collective conventions, there is a big difference between or-
dinary or enabling forms of sociality on the one hand and the
kind of extinction of aliveness that Winnicott describes on the
other. The False Self has lost what both Heidegger and Lacan
describe as the subject’s poetic relationship to the world. Such
a self is no longer able to distinguish its desires from what the
collective order determines to be desirable.
Winnicott claims that in such a state of false compliance
the world and its details are recognized “only as something to
be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries
with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated
with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth liv-
ing” (1971a, 65). “The symptom of uncreative living,” in other
words, “is the feeling that nothing means anything” (1970,
50). Against this backdrop, creative living entails the ability to
resist both the seductions and compulsions of conventionality;
it means “seeing everything afresh” (41).

The Facilitating Environment

Winnicott explains that while each infant possesses the

potential for creative living—the spontaneous gesture—this
potentiality can materialize as a psychic reality only in the
context of a sufficiently facilitating childhood environment.
While Lacan, following Freud, views psychic development as a
matter of coming to terms with one’s insignificance and lack
of omnipotence in relation to an always disappointing world,
Winnicott portrays the world as at least potentially enabling and
satisfying. While Lacan regards subject formation as a matter
of separation, differentiation, and disillusionment, Winnicott
underscores that it is the infant’s increasingly intricate involve-
ment in social networks that allows it to cultivate its capacity
for creative living.
Winnicott, in other words, attempts to clarify how the self
develops from a state of absolute dependence to relative au-
tonomy without at the same time denouncing its ties to others.
364 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

In his estimation, the infant does not acquire a self by growing

out of its early relationships as much as by learning to participate
in such relationships with a greater degree of independence.
The infant’s encounter with the external world enriches and
expands its psychic reality, with the result that its emerging
subjectivity “is related to the outer or actual world and yet is
personal and capable of an aliveness of its own” (1967, 31).
Winnicott’s account of subject formation is therefore gentler
than that of Lacan: instead of separation being the primary
motor of psychic life, the infant’s identity arises in the context
of a nurturing interpersonal space.
Winnicott thus believes that the gradual integration and
consolidation of psychic life requires proper environmental
care—what he calls “the magic of intimacy” (1967, 31). In stark
contrast to Lacan, Winnicott argues that a sufficiently facilitat-
ing environment feeds the infant’s sense of omnipotence in the
sense that it preserves the infant’s illusion of having created the
world that it encounters. Ultimately, the infant obviously has to
cope with the recognition that the world exists independently
of its creative activity; it has to accept the reality principle.
However, Winnicott’s point is that it is the infant who has been
allowed fully to experience its omnipotence who is best able
to tolerate the limitations that the world imposes. This is in
part because by the time the reality principle is introduced,
the child is already well on its way to being able to symbolize.5
From Winnicott’s point of view, therefore, only an infant who
has been raised in an adaptive environment can in turn adapt
to the demands of the environment. This means that prob-
lems in early intimate relationships—such as lack of adequate
support or recognition—can damage the infant’s capacity for
authentic subjectivity.
The classic Winnicottian example of environmental failure
is the mother who fails to be good enough, who fails to meet
the infant’s needs and fantasies and who consequently ends up
imposing her own psychic reality on the infant. Such a mother
does not accommodate, but rather intrudes and impinges, thus
extinguishing the infant’s spontaneous aliveness. Winnicott
goes on to specify that the False Self frequently develops in
response to a depressed mother who, unable to recognize the
infant, demands the infant’s recognition of—and compliance
 Mari Ruti 365

to—her own depressive mood. In this situation, the infant is

forced to masquerade liveliness in order to protect itself against
the mother’s psychic deadness; the infant reassures the mother
instead of being reassured. As Winnicott explains, “The task of
the infant in such a case is to be alive and to look alive and to
communicate being alive” (1963, 192). Such an infant builds
the foundations of its psychic life upon the premise of having
to meet unfailingly the demands of the outside world, with
the result that it may never be able to actualize its potential
for creative living.
A lot could be said—and a lot has been said—about Win-
nicott’s obsession with good-enough mothering and the kinds
of burdens that this emphasis places on mothers. The prob-
lem is not only that the mother gets blamed for the infant’s
developmental failures, but also that she becomes so power-
ful that she seems single-handedly to determine the infant’s
future life and psychic destiny. However, if we let the mother
off the hook and think of environmental failure more broadly,
Winnicott’s theory helps us understand why it is frequently so
very difficult for individuals to maintain spontaneous identi-
ties. Certain kinds of environments—oppressive or impinging
environments—elicit psychic compliance. They put individu-
als on the defensive. And they cause individuals to die inside
so as to fend off being violated, exploited, or run over by the
outside world.
In the contemporary context, one could argue that there
is something about the postmodern cultural moment—a
moment characterized by unrelenting exposure to external
stimulation, multiple demands on our time and attention,
an accelerated pace of life, a surface-oriented tone of social
interactions, and a fragmentation of communal space—that
makes it difficult to fend off psychic compliance. On the one
hand, postmodern culture prides itself on its unprecedented
fluidity and versatility—the fact that it allows for a diversity of
existential modes to coexist in a heterogeneous space. On the
other hand, the ever-accelerating tempo of the postmodern
world can overwhelm the subject’s psychic life, propelling it
into a defensive (and therefore inherently inflexible) manner
of living. This is one way to understand why so many of us
experience the overstimulating ethos of contemporary culture
366 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

as numbing and soul-deadening. In a sense, we are never far

from the specter of the Winnicottian False Self.
Though Winnicott regards psychic maturity as a matter of
sufficient ego integration, he simultaneously underscores that
defensive integration—the illusion of impenetrable coherence
that marks the False Self—leads to a lack of creativity. He goes
on to maintain that creativity by definition implies the capacity
to tolerate “nonpurposive” states of being—states of internal
unintegration that allow the subject to access a psychic reality
that is qualitatively different from the one that sustains every-
day existence. Creativity, in other words, calls for the subject’s
ability to surrender its habitual psychic boundaries so as to
allow nonhabitual modes of thought and being to emerge;
in this sense, it is only by relinquishing the ordinary that the
extraordinary can be discovered. As Winnicott explains, “It is
only here, in this unintegrated state of the personality, that
that which we describe as creative can appear” (1971b, 64).
The inability to allow oneself to experience such moments of
disintegration—an inability that both defines and debilitates
the False Self—makes creativity impossible. As Winnicott states,
“Organized defence against disintegration robs the individual
of the precondition for the creative impulse and therefore
prevents creative living” (1967, 29).
Winnicott’s theory of subjectivity is thus subtle in the
sense that it posits psychic integration as a precondition for
unintegration. In other words, if Winnicott privileges early de-
velopmental processes that allow the subject to attain a greater
degree of integration, it is because he believes that unintegrated
(nonpurposive) states of being can only be attained by a psyche
that feels secure enough momentarily to surrender its sense of
mastery. Integration is therefore important not because it gives
the subject a coherent sense of being but, quite the contrary,
because it makes the subject feel sufficiently protected to be
able to relinquish its coherence. A subject who has experienced
a reassuring degree of psychic integration trusts its environment
enough to be able to relax its vigilance vis-à-vis the world. From
this perspective, the point of psychic integration is to enable
the individual occasionally to undo that integration.
The fact that Winnicott regards the capacity for psychic
unintegration—for formless experience—as a precondition
 Mari Ruti 367

of creativity explains why he places such a strong emphasis

on playing as a free-floating activity that is momentarily liber-
ated from the demands of psychic coherence. This is also why
Winnicott likens the clinical practice of psychoanalysis to play-
ing. Like playing, free association facilitates the emergence of
unintegrated states of being. As such, it is capable of fostering
what Winnicott describes as the subject’s “tingling” (1967, 31)
sense of being fully alive.
Winnicott’s choice of play as a metaphor for psychoanalysis
points to a very particular understanding of what analysis is
supposed to accomplish. Envisioning analysis as a practice of
play makes it impossible to conceptualize the analytic process
as an attempt to stabilize the self into a definitive identity or
way of being. The similarities with phenomenology are once
again startling: because the notion of play privileges the endless
process of becoming over the stasis of being, it by necessity ad-
vances an open-ended model of subjectivity. The “play” of free
association cannot aim at fixed subjective truth, but merely gives
the individual access to a provisional kind of self-knowledge—
the kind of self-knowledge that could be argued to be creative
precisely to the extent that it is inconclusive.
Analysis—as a form of play that pursues psychic enrich-
ment without demanding truth—facilitates a distinctive process
of becoming a person. It underscores that self-constitution
is never a linear project, but activates diverse modalities of
subjective reality. It asks the subject to recognize that insofar
as the present is always influenced by the past, and insofar as
the future is always a fantasized component of the present,
existence inevitably takes place on multiple levels at once. And
it employs narratives—or narrative fragments, more properly
speaking—to highlight the fact that life histories are always full
of ruptures, uncertainties, contradictions, and inconsistencies.
These kinds of narratives thrive on the ambiguity of language,
making possible the emergence of a distinctive voice that is
potentially powerful enough to transform a life—to reinvent
a personal story—without at the same time asserting mastery.
Indeed, it may well be that what is most important about such
narratives is that they give the subject access to the mobility
of language, for the mobility of language is what, in the final
analysis, allows for the mobility of being. In this sense, the
368 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

playfulness that Winnicott privileges can only be activated by

language. In Lacanian terms, one might say that analysis injects
poetry (the poetic function of language) into the subject’s
otherwise prosaic existence.
Insofar as Winnicott believes that it is play that gives the
subject access to its True Self, he, like Lacan, recognizes that
subjective “truth” is always poetic rather than essential. This
suggests that the Winnicottian True Self, somewhat counterin-
tuitively, ends up foregrounding the ultimate impossibility of
stable subjective truth. This of course does not imply that the
self cannot experience itself as real, unique, or fully present
in the world. It merely means that the self is free to direct its
attention to endeavors other than the pursuit of an ever-elusive
truth; instead of expending its psychic energies in chasing an
impossible goal, it is invited to focus them on undertakings
that may—fleetingly at least—give it a sense of aliveness. This
is one way to understand what it might entail to live one’s
fragmentation and decenteredness as empowering rather than
debilitating.

Who Can Afford Creative Living?

I have sought to demonstrate that despite the obvious dif-

ferences between Winnicott and Lacan, the two thinkers share
the insight that a falsely coherent psychic structure prevents the
subject from living in the world in supple and creative ways. I
would in fact suggest that the Winnicottian False Self is con-
ceptually quite close to what Lacan means by the ego-bound
self that is unable to overcome its narcissistic fallacies. Both
display an artificially coherent psychic organization designed to
conceal a less stable reality. Both suppress elements of the self
that deviate from the painstakingly constructed (yet ultimately
hollow) image that is designed to sustains the psyche’s pretense
of perfection. And both function as desperate defenses against
the danger of psychic disintegration.
This implies that Winnicott’s desire to uncover the True
Self underneath its false manifestations—very much like Lacan’s
wish to unravel the self’s narcissistic delusions—is an attempt
to show us that it is only by learning to cope resiliently with
 Mari Ruti 369

its lack of integration that the subject can begin to confront

the challenges of its existence in innovative ways. Inasmuch as
Winnicott’s True Self functions as an antidote to the psyche’s
false solidity, it, like Lacan’s theory of foundational alienation,
reveals that it is precisely to the extent that the self can tolerate
states of incoherence that it is creative.
Both Lacan and Winnicott are deeply suspicious of ex-
cessive displays of coherence. Self-consistency taken to an
extreme, both thinkers imply, can be an impediment to in-
ner vitality and multidimensionality. This, I believe, gives us
a productive way to approach the question of creativity (and
even of psychic potentiality) in the constructivist context. I
think that a constructivist model of creative living cannot be
directed at making our lives more coherent, but must instead
convey something meaningful about coping with its intrinsic
incoherence. Its aim cannot be to conjure away life’s tensions,
ambiguities, and points of bewilderment, but rather to teach us
how to live through these without breaking our spirit. By this
I do not mean to argue that we should not respect our desire
to feel grounded in the world, but merely to suggest that one
of the best things we can do for our well-being is to learn to
accept the fact that life’s unpredictability invariably exceeds
our capacity to control it. As a matter of fact, the more we
cling to the notion of predictability, the less dexterously are
we able to deal with life as the erratic and capricious stream
of unanticipated events, encounters, and developments that
it often is. No matter how carefully we strive to organize our
lives around certain centers of security—ideals, ambitions, or
relationships, for instance—it is our lot as human beings to
learn to survive in less than secure circumstances. I think that
psychoanalysis at its best—when it curtails its dogmatic and
prescriptive tendencies—can empower us to meet the unfore-
seen with a measure of inner resilience.
Lacan and Winnicott help us understand that living
creatively in the postmodern era entails accepting existential
insecurity as something that none of us, insofar as we are
creatures of consciousness (and unconsciousness), can elude.
This of course raises the question of who can afford to accept
insecurity as a precondition of creative living. We have already
established that the world is full of obstacles to creative liv-
370 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

ing, that certain kinds of environments actively assault the

individual’s psychic life. This means that some individuals are
confronted by forms and degrees of insecurity that far exceed
what is “normal” in human life (even in a postmodern world).
For example, oppressive sociocultural and economic condi-
tions can erode the subject’s psychic resources for the simple
reason that they oblige it to focus on survival. In this manner,
deprivileged subjects are compelled to experience the external
world as inherently hostile and impinging. As a result, extreme
anxiety—the sinking feeling that there is no respite from the
world’s intrusiveness—may be an unavoidable component of
oppression.6 And it would be a mistake to equate this kind of
anxiety with the foundational anxieties of human existence.
In Lacanian terms, one could say that to the extent that op-
pression seeks to turn the deprivileged subject into an object of
use for the oppressor—to the extent that the oppressed becomes
a mere instrument of the oppressor’s sadistic jouissance—the
outcome of oppression is to force the subject into a nonpo-
etic (monotonous, repetitive, and predictable) relationship
to the signifier. In practical terms, this means that oppression
annihilates the subject’s capacity to construct the parameters
of its own being, robbing it of voice and narrative agency. By
coercing the subject to internalize the very discourses that are
designed to denigrate and humiliate it, oppression compels it
to experience language—the agency of the letter—as wound-
ing rather than as (at least potentially) enabling. The signi-
fier, in other words, gets stuck or immobilized in debilitating
circuits of meaning, marking the subject with—and making it
the bearer of—the oppressor’s sadistic desire. In this manner,
oppression not only imposes a significatory rigidity that drains
the subject’s capacity for existential versatility, but reinforces
the traumatic logic of the repetition compulsion, whereby the
very signifier that injures and carries harm is also the signifier
that is the most powerfully prominent, dictating the destiny
of the subject’s psychic life. This is one of the mechanisms by
which oppression destroys the deprivileged subject’s self-regard.
In Winnicott’s terms, it causes the subject to feel that it has
ceased to exist.
Here we come up against one of the limitations of Laca-
nian theory, namely the fact that Lacan’s adamant critique of
 Mari Ruti 371

the narcissistic tendencies of the ego makes it rather difficult

to appreciate instances where the ego has been so profoundly
wounded by abusive or oppressive interpersonal relationships
that its capacity for narcissistic fantasies has been destroyed.
While Lacan is correct in being suspicious of the ego’s capac-
ity to mislead the subject to think that it is more coherent
or powerful than it actually is, his theory is less useful when
it comes to cases where a damaged ego misleads the subject
to believe in its own worthlessness or insignificance. This ex-
plains why Lacanian theory is not particularly effective when it
comes to understanding the debilitating effects of contingent
(circumstantial rather than constitutive) forms of trauma. The
notion of learning to live with one’s lack or insecurity takes on
a wholly different valence when the lack or insecurity in ques-
tion emerges from past neglect, abuse, or oppression.
In instances that involve the forceful robbing of the subject’s
sense of self-worth—as in the case with subjects who have been
devastated by painful formative experiences, or whose sense of
inadequacy arises from inegalitarian social arrangements—it
may be necessary to reconstitute the ego before embarking
upon a critique of its ontological status.7 It is equally possible,
however, that individuals who have experienced a high level
of trauma possess a heightened awareness of the manner in
which lack and insecurity constitute an inescapable component
of human existence. The question may be too case-specific
to be resolved on a purely theoretical level. Yet there is no
doubt that there are specific signifiers—signifiers that carry
the unequal effects of power—that defile the subject, that cut
and wound the subject in devastating ways. The subject who is
under assault in this manner may find it difficult to relax its
wakeful vigilance in relation to the world; it may find it difficult
to allow for unintegrated states of being to emerge.
In this context, it is worthwhile to keep in mind Winnicott’s
assertion that the individual’s capacity for creative living can
never be entirely destroyed—that although the spontaneous
gesture can be compromised, it cannot ever be definitively
extinguished. Indeed, as we have already learned, one of the
main tasks of the False Self is to protect the True Self from
being found and exploited. In this sense, the False Self, rather
than designating the annihilation of the True Self, can (in
372 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World

certain situations) function as a crucial defense against a de-

bilitating world. In its most positive incarnation, it may even
work to create the conditions under which the True Self might
eventually be able to risk revealing itself. In this last scenario,
the True Self is “acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a
secret life” (1960, 143). In this paradoxical way, the False Self
can carry the responsibility for sustaining and (in the long run)
resuscitating the individual’s capacity for creative living. As
Phillips (1988) puts it, “The false self is playing for time until
a sufficiently nurturing environment can be found in which
development can start up again” (125).
Throughout my discussion, I have accentuated the idea
that Winnicott’s distinction between the True and False Selves
in many ways grants us a psychoanalytic rendering of what
phenomenology describes as the divide between authentic and
inauthentic existential modes. What I find most interesting
about Winnicott is the fact that he recognizes that this is not a
categorical, either/or distinction, but that we tend to vacillate
between these two ways of being in the world. Indeed, even
when we fail to live creatively, we hold onto the idea that we
have the potential to do so at some future point. As Winnicott
explains, “In a tantalizing way many individuals have experi-
enced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most
of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in
the creativity of someone else, or of a machine” (1971a, 65).
Ironically, then, the fact that we feel disconnected from our
capacity for creative living—that we are aware that something
is missing in our lives—is a sign that, psychically speaking, we
are still alive, that some untamed or unbroken part of us is still
aspiring for recognition. From this perspective, even oppres-
sion need not in the end definitively obliterate the subject’s
will to (a creative) life.
This, however, does not erase the question of theoretical
and political responsibility. How do we adequately and ethically
distinguish between psychic insecurity as a universal existential
predicament on the one hand and insecurity as a state of affairs
that arises from oppressive social or interpersonal arrangements
on the other? If the False Self serves, as Winnicott proposes,
as a protection against a potentially traumatizing external
 Mari Ruti 373

world, then under what conditions does it become possible to

relinquish it?
These are questions that I pose not only to psychoanalysis,
but also, more generally, to those of us who are invested in
constructivist theories of subjectivity. How does the self know
that in risking itself—in letting down its psychic defenses—it
is not risking too much?
Department of English
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8
Canada
mari.ruti@utoronto.ca

Notes
1. The synopsis of Lacanian theory that this essay presents is based on Lacan’s early
work rather than on his final seminars (which are more focused on the Real than
the Imaginary and the Symbolic).
2. Here it is worth noting that the blissful state of plenitude and jouissance that the
subject pursues is always necessarily a retroactive and purely fantasmatic construct
designed to conceal the fact that no such primordial condition of unmitigated
enjoyment ever existed.
3. As Lacan (1975) explains, “The aim of my teaching, insofar as it pursues what
can be said and enunciated on the basis of analytic discourse, is to dissociate a
and A by reducing the first to what is related to the imaginary and the other to
what is related to the symbolic” (83).
4. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1960), for instance, Lacan argues that, like a pot-
ter who creates a vase around emptiness, the subject fashions a signifier, or an
elaborate sequence of signifiers, from the void of its being (120–21). On this
view, the signifier is not merely what mortifies the preoedipal body, but also what
empowers the subject to move to an existential space beyond mortification by
granting it the gift of creativity. For an excellent analysis of this aspect of Lacan,
see Silverman (2000, 45–49).
5. Winnicott’s famous concept of transitional objects and phenomena is designed to
explain how the shift from omnipotence to symbolization takes place. Through
the use of such objects and phenomena, the child rehearses, as it were, the
skills necessary for symbolization. As a result, they pave the way for separation,
independence, and individuation, providing a safety net for the child’s inevitable
loss of omnipotence. Inasmuch as they are the basis of symbol formation, these
skills gradually evolve into the subject’s capacity to participate in the cultural life
of its society. Health, Winnicott asserts, is “closely bound up with the capacity of
the individual to live in an area that is intermediate between the dream and the
reality, that which is called the cultural life” (1960, 150). A poverty of cultural
life, in turn, is a sign of the False Self.
6. There are many excellent analyses on the psychic effects of oppression. See, for
instance, Lynne Layton (1998); Anne Cheng (2000); and Kelly Oliver (2001;
2004).
7. Lewis Kirshner’s (2004) sensitive analysis of forms of mirroring that offer a
vulnerable self much-needed and legitimate recognition (rather than merely
feeding its narcissistic fantasies) seems relevant here. More generally speaking,
374 Living Creatively in a Postmodern World
Kirshner’s ability to address the problematic of trauma from a specifically Lacanian
perspective forges valuable connections between Lacanian and non-Lacanian
approaches.

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