Playing and Reality
Transitional objects and potential space. Winnicott at his most quoted and least dogmatic.
Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist.
Playing and Reality gathers the papers in which Winnicott sets out his account of transitional objects and transitional phenomena, the not yet questioned zone the infant holds between thumb and teddy bear. From that first object he builds the idea of a potential space between inner and outer reality, neither wholly subjective nor wholly external, and locates cultural experience there: in art, religion and imaginative living. The book argues that an object becomes usable only after the subject has destroyed it in fantasy and found that it survives, a move that turns projection into relationship. Playing, for Winnicott, is not a preliminary to serious work but the ground on which a self forms and on which therapy proceeds. For the clinician it reframes the consulting room as a shared area of play, and offers a vocabulary for creativity, illusion and the transitional that sits close to ordinary practice.
About the author
Donald Woods Winnicott
Donald Winnicott (1896 to 1971) was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who spent four decades at Paddington Green Children's Hospital and twice served as President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He belonged to the Independent group. His work locates development in the facilitating environment provided by the good-enough mother, whose ordinary care lets the infant's true self emerge rather than a compliant false self. Transitional objects and potential space name the intermediate area where play, illusion and cultural life take hold.
Details
- 1971
- English
- Routledge
- Routledge, 1971
- 232
- 9780415345460