“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” - 1 Corinthians 13:11
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and thought, “This is a conversation I used to have. It’s even one I used to put a lot of stock in. But I no longer think it’s where the action is really at”?
There are some ways of dealing with ideas, of speaking, and of thinking that we have to learn from and then move beyond, argues this week’s podcast guest, Matthew Stanley. Stanley calls these “transitional discourses.” Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had argued that children utilize transitional objects, like their thumb, blankie, or stuffed animal to replicate the security of the mother as they transition to independence. What if some forms of intellectual practice are like that as well?
Thus, the goal of the transitional object is to fall away. Eventually, the blankie is forgotten, folded up, and tucked away in a closet somewhere. The transitional object has served its role faithfully when it can be left behind, signaling that the child has internalized those functions which the transitional object had to supply externally.
The question becomes though, what happens when our transitional object stick around to long? And could certain discourses and regimes of practice in a religious community serve the role of something like a transitional object in people's lives in the broader process of their becoming more human?
-Matthew Stanley, “Transitional discourses and getting (un)stuck”
Listen to the podcast The Flâneur and the Philosopher on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
Matthew Stanley is a writer at Samsara Diagnostics and Samsara Media whose work sits at the intersection of psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and Christian theology. A graduate of Wheaton College, he is the author of Ideology and Christian Freedom: A theo-political reading of Shusaku Endo's Silence (yes, like the Martin Scorsese film) and a book of poetry, Every Sunset is a Moonrise: Faith, Poetry, Finitude.
Our discussion is based on his article, “Transitional discourses and getting (un-)stuck,” which was also a video presentation at Philosophy Portal.
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