ARTIGOS

 

Changing the terms of psychoanalysis. From object to space and the nature of the transition

 

 

Lesley Caldwell

British Psycho-Analytical Society, International Psychoanalytical Association

Correspondence to

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This paper examines the two versions of DWW’s paper on transitional objects and transitional phenomena and compares the 1951 paper with other papers of the period to argue for the significant shift heralded by Winnicott and his approach.  The paper goes on to discuss the extensive use of Winnicott’s ideas in a range of different  disciplines and clinical conditions  and argues for  a careful rereading of Winnicott himself and his fundamental contribution.

Keywords: Winnicott, Transitional objects, Transitional phenomena.

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RESUMO

Este artigo examina as duas versões do artigo de DWW sobre os objetos e fenômenos transicionais e compara a versão de 1951 com outros artigos do mesmo período, para discutir as mudanças feitas por Winnicott. O artigo pretende discutir o uso extensivo das idéias de Winnicott numa ampla escala de disciplinas diferentes e de circunstâncias clínicas, fazendo uma releitura cuidadosa destas duas versões e de sua contribuição fundamental.

Palavras-chave: Winnicott, Objetos transicionais, Fenômenos transicionais.

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The area encompassed by transitional objects and phenomena is the one for which Winnicott is perhaps best known, and it is often claimed as his most significant contribution (Turner 2002, p. 1072; Green 1984; Rycroft 1972, p. 145). The idea of TO and TP was introduced by DWW in a paper given in 1951, published first in the IJPA in 1953, and republished in a slightly revised version in 1971 as the first chapter of Playing and Reality. The paper published in 1953 was not the same as that delivered in 1951. It had been subject to considerable revision and had been intended for a Festschrift for Klein (Rodman 2003, pp. 164-66). It remains important in two distinct, but related ways: the idea of an intermediate area between external and internal as fundamental to human development, and the extension of the significance of this infantile stage, which DW loosely ascribes to 4-12 months, to the arena of art, culture and religion.

The paper is most concerned with setting out the case for infantile development and this concentration on the baby and its development and the implications for the analytic setting were always DW’s major preoccupation. The extension to a wider arena is referred to almost in passing, but it has subsequently been the subject of much attention in discussions of the art work, the artist and cultural experience. What has been built on Winnicott’s basic ideas has offered important alternatives in psychoanalytic approaches to art.

Most of the first half of the paper that provides the first chapter of Playing and Reality (1971/1971a) is almost identical with the earlier version. The second half contains the most obvious addition, a section entitled An Application of the Theory comprising two clinical examples (one already published). Although this is the only major addition I shall not discuss it in any detail today. Since the larger part of the 1971 version is the same, other, less obvious changes are easily overlooked. Some of them may be significant, others may not; some relate to minor editing choices - different words, reorganisation of sentences, the addition of headings, the omission of references (why is always an interesting question, and indeed whether they are the work of the editor, Khan or the author). Like all thinkers, Winnicott’s ideas developed over time and something is to be gained in understanding how that development occurred. In studying Freud DWW said he was “addicted to his footnotes” as indicators where his mind was beginning to move forward in ways he wasn’t always fully conscious of (see Winnicott 1989/1989a, p. 244). Perhaps this offers a clue to the way Winnicott’s own mind worked; and lends some support to my project today which otherwise might be thought to be evidence of an undue focus on marginalia.

The paper is first concerned to identify these changes, whose provenance is uncertain, and then to suggest that the two versions, ostensibly the same article, the same argument, may, within a common framework, nonetheless register a shift in Winnicott’s thinking that culminates in Playing and Reality.

In his introduction, Winnicott states that it is the book itself that constitutes the real development of the original paper, and he registers his conviction that “cultural experience has not found its true place in the theory used by analysts in their work and their thinking” (p. xi). This statement firmly links the two areas, “cultural experience” and “analytic work and thought”, but it also ascribes an importance to “cultural experience” in its own right.

A close reading of the paper in its two versions reveals, almost in passing, aspects of the development of Winnicott’s thought, and, at least potentially, an implied interaction and dialogue with colleagues. Apparently minor, differences in what was omitted and what was added, also seem, on closer examination, of greater interest for an understanding of the history of psychoanalysis, and the differing intellectual and psychoanalytic climates of the fifties and the late sixties and Winnicott’s anxiety and concern about his place probably contributed to some of the omissions and additions. The ongoing attempt at an engagement with Klein has gone in 1971 (see Aguayo 2002 for a discussion of this in the period preceding the paper under discussion here) but Winnicott could also assume that his readers were familiar with the term and its general meaning, whereas in 1951/53 he was aware they were not (Reeves, 2007, personal communication).

Most of the changes in the later version relate to the omission of footnotes contained in the 1951 paper, but there is also a footnote added in the later paper in the section on “Illusion”. I single out, as particularly enabling of further thought, the interest in transitional space, and the move from the use of “illusion” in the first version to that of “paradox” in the second. Taken together, they register a real change of emphasis within an argument that is nonetheless consistent over time. Bonaminio has suggested this shift may also derive from Winnicott’s growing concern with the clinical situation and his diminishing interest in development per se (personal communication, 2007; 2004; for further positions on this see Reeves 2006 and Fulgencio 2007).

In the first section of this paper I describe the kinds of changes and give some examples of them. The variations in the two versions include: 1. added or omitted words and phrases; 2. added or omitted footnotes and references; 3 added or omitted substantive passages.

The addition of words and phrases seems mainly to be in the interests of clarity. For instance, in the 1971 version, at the end of the first paragraph of the section Inadequacy of usual statement of human nature, the sentence reads, “of every individual who has reached the stage of being a unit… it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world that can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war”. To this is added: “This helps but is it enough?” (1971/1971a, p. 2).

The example of an omission is of a different order. For instance, the clinical example that occurs after the discussion of the differing meanings of “symbol” for Roman and English Catholics in the earlier account. It reads: “A schizoid patient asked me, after xmas, had I enjoyed eating her at the feast. And then, had I really eaten her or only in fantasy. I knew that she could not be satisfied with either alternative. Her split needed the double answer” (p. 234).

In this case, and in another omission of a speculative footnote: “Here, there could possibly be an explanation for the use of the term wool gathering which means inhabiting the transitional or intermediate area” (p. 231), added as footnote to “The baby starts from early months to pluck wool and collect it and use it for the caressing part of the activity” (ib.), a clinical Winnicott appears in his own text, engaged in his own associations to his observations of babies and to patients material. Such examples are certainly incidental to the main argument, and evidence of clinical asides and associations may be considered as unimportant, or as detracting from DWW the theorist, but, whatever the reasons for them, it seems to me that something is lost of a particular clinical mind at work.

When it comes to added or omitted footnotes and references, things are more complex.

The first foonote omitted in the 1971 version appears on page 1. It is the footnote to the secondary title of the article, A Study of the first Not-me possession. The original read:

It is necessary to stress that the word used here is possession and not object. In the typed version distributed to members I did in fact use the word object (instead of possession) in one place by mistake and this led to confusion in the discussion. It was pointed out that the first not-me object is usually taken to be the breast. The reader’s attention is drawn to the use of the word transitional in many places by Fairbairn. (1952, p. 35)

On the basis of the prevailing orthodoxy in the use of the “object”, DWW opted for the more neutral “possession”, while still retaining the adjectival phrase, “transitional object”. But “a possession”, when applied to a young baby, also indicates some assumptions about the baby’s desire and the organisation of that desire. What is involved in possessing something, and what this conveys about Winnicott’s idea of a baby and when that baby can begin to entertain, in however basic a form, the idea of possessing something, is an important basis for his developmental model.

This distinction between “possession” and “object” is retained in both versions and the difference between an “internal object” and a “possession” is further elaborated in the body of the paper in the section on Klein. In Winnicott’s account, the first not me possession depends upon a developmental awareness that Klein’s assertion of a rudimentary awareness of the breast as separate from the beginning does not. This is a fundamental divergence in the psychological meanings to be ascribed to developmental processes. Its later omission may indicate Winnicott’s own changed, more confident attitude to how such differences (from Klein especially) are to be handled, and register their comparative lack of importance by the end of the sixties.

The qualifications/clarifications of this footnote as regards both “object/possession” and “transition” seem to be concerned to locate his account in the continuing psychoanalytic tradition, although in the case of the first, “object/possession”, it acknowledges the tradition, only to depart from it. The difference between an internal object as a mental concept as described by Klein, and generally accepted, and Winnicott’s choice of the word “possession”, alongside his continuing use of the “transitional object” remains. What both his uses emphasise is not the externality of the existence of an actual object, for instance, the teddy bear, but the importance of the internal processes required to arrive at the capacity to use such an apparently external and separate object. It is the prior internalisation of a good enough internal object, the mother, which makes the baby’s move towards an interest in an object beyond itself and its mother both feasible and necessary. It is only really if the mother is good enough that a TO can be used successfully; its existence (or its healthy existence?) is dependent upon the relation with the mother. The variations in what can be used and what it may mean, the relation between an internal object and an external object, the healthy and pathological uses of the objects, may all provide important clinical information. Many of these differences are organised around the different mental space/involvement that the child brings to the transitional object: is it a soother or a comforter, is it a fetish, is it mother herself or a part of the child, how does it relate to touch, to sucking, and to making sounds. The insights from such assessments may then be able to be translated to the analytic situation and used there. Equally, information about these early processes will be obtained there.

The cited reference to Fairbairn is to Abraham’s extension of Freud’s model by dividing the oral phase and adding a stage of mature dependence:

Between these two stages is a transition stage characterised by an increasing tendency to abandon the attitude of infantile dependence and an increasing tendency to adopt the attitude of mature dependence. This transition stage corresponds to three of Abraham’s phases, the two anal phases and the early genital (phallic) phase. (Fairbairn 1941, 1952; republished 1990, p. 35)

Or again: “In so far as the transition stage is concerned with the abandonment of infantile dependence it is now seen to be inevitable that rejection of the object will play an all important part” (p. 35)

Again a reference to another analyst’s use of “transition” provides a historical context and perhaps validation for Winnicott’s own use by locating it in a tradition from Abraham on. The letter to Strachey of Ist May 1951 (Rodman 1987, p. 24) hints at Winnicott’s own concerning psychoanalytic theory and, in the atmosphere of the early fifties and Winnicott’s departure from the positions of Klein, an appeal to historical continuity may have been necessary, personally and intellectually, in a way that it was not twenty years later. In a letter to Money Kyrle, dated 27 November, 1952, Winnicott says, “The word ‘intermediate’ is certainly useful but the word ‘transition’ implies movement and I must not lose sight of it otherwise we shall find some sort of static phenomenon being given an association with my name” (apud Rodman 1987, p. 42). It is this emphasis on process and movement that encapsulates the innovativeness and the ongoing importance of the transitional object and transitional phenomena paper.

References and footnotes generally imply bibliographical decisions, but it may be of interest that almost all the references omitted relate to literature on the child. For example, in the footnotes and references omitted from the section, Development of a Personal Pattern, the first, in response to his point , “somehow or other the bit of cloth is held and sucked”, (p. 231) refers to the film by Robertson, A two year old goes to hospital, then there is the association to wool gathering (referred to earlier). References to Freud (1905) and to Hoffer (1949) on “Mouth hand integration” Scott (1955), “A note on blathering” and to Illingworth (1951) “On sleep disturbances” are all omitted.

In the comparison between the two brothers and their respective use of a transitional object, the 1953 version contained the footnote, “The mother had learned from her first child that it was a good idea to give one bottle feed while breast feeding, that is, to allow for the positive value of substitutes for herself, and by this means she achieved easier weaning than with X (p. 235). At the end of this section a reference to Stevenson’s 1954 article, “The first treasured possession”, is omitted. Taken together, these omissions subtly reorganise Winnicott, the expert on mothers and children, possibly in the interests of Winnicott, the analytic thinker.

A further interesting decision would appear to be that of omitting half a footnote about the technique of mothering, that provides an added gloss on the statement, “A subjective phenomenon develops in the baby which we call the mother’s breast” (p. 239; p. 11).

The original footnote reads:

I include the whole technique of mothering when it is said that the first object is the breast. The word, breast is used, I believe, to stand for the technique of mothering as well as for the actual flesh. It is not impossible for a mother to be a good enough mother in my way of putting it with a bottle for the actual feeding. (ib.)

The second version stops there. The first goes on:

If this wide meaning of the word breast is kept in mind and maternal technique is seen to be included in the total meaning of the term, then there is a bridge forming between the wording of Melanie Klein’s statement of early history and that of Anna Freud. The only difference left is one of dates, which is in fact an unimportant difference which will automatically disappear in the course of time. (p. 239; p. 11)

This claim, in 1953, for a link between Klein and Anna Freud in the matter of early history, seems an attempt on Winnicott’s part to suggest connections and construct bridges and to find common ground, an insistence that also appears in a letter to Rosenfeld in the same period (January, 1953) where Winnicott insists that Anna Freud “knows that there is more to it [her account] than a series of techniques (in Winnicott 1987/1987b, p. 45).

In the section, Illusion - disillusionment, two footnotes are omitted in 1971. Winnicott says:

There is no possibility whatever for an infant to proceed from the pleasure
principle to the reality principle or towards and beyond primary identification [(Freud 1923); footnote 1. Freud (1921)] unless there is a good enough mother (footnote 2). (p. 237)

The second footnote, which is important for Winnicott’s own account reads:

One effect, and the main effect, of failure of the mother in this respect at the start of an infant’s life is discussed clearly in my view by Marion Milner (1952). She shows that because of the mother’s failure there is brought about a premature ego development, with precocious sorting out of a bad object from a good object. The period of illusion or my transitional phase is disturbed. In analysis or in various activities in ordinary life an individual can be seen to be going on seeking the valuable resting place of illusion. Illusion, in this way, has its positive value. (my italics) See also Freud (1950). (p. 237)

This sentence is repeated in the original Summary, while in 1971, “illusion” is changed to “paradox”.

In the section, Clinical description of a transitional object and the availability of much clinical material, a footnote referring to Wulff’s (1946) paper, “Fetishism and object choice in early childhood”, is omitted, as is the later discussion of it towards the end of the paper in the section, Illusion and the value of illusion. These references contain an important differentiation of Winnicott’s position from that of Wulff’s and they are also relevant to much of the later widespread dissemination of the idea of Transitional Objects. The footnote says:

Wulff is clearly studying this same phenomenon but he calls the objects “fetish objects”. It is not clear to me that this term is correct and I discuss this below. I did not actually know of Wulff’s paper until I had written my own, but it gave me great pleasure and support to find the subject had already been considered worthy of discussion by a colleague. See also Abraham (1916) and Lindner (1879). (p. 234)

The discussion in the text returns to fetish objects and what for DWW would be lost by using “fetish” to describe what he wants to insist are normal infantile phenomena. He regards Wulff as beginning from “the psychopathology of fetishism” and the ordinary theory of the sexual perversions (p. 241). Wulff’s account would then relate to the delusion of a maternal phallus, while Winnicott’s own insistence on the universality of illusion allows for the inclusion of the illusion of a maternal phallus as normal and non pathological. Winnicott suggests this normality can be attested in the concentration, not on the “object”, but on the “illusion”, which “is a universal in the field of experience”. He adds, “Following this we can allow the TO to be potentially a maternal phallus but originally the breast, that is to say, the thing created by the infant and at the same time provided by the environment (p. 241). While this could be used to understand fetishism, addiction and thieving (p. 242) it does not necessarily entail them. This restores the TO to the arena of normal infantile phenomena. In the 1971 version the “normality” (and universality) of TO and TP is taken as accepted, but in 1953 it has to be argued for.

If the capacity to have a TO in a way that does not become a fetish depends upon a prior state of affairs between mother and baby
a transitional object is not only, or primarily, a substitute, and it is what substitution entails and makes possible through the good enough mother baby relationship that is fundamental.

Both version of the paper set down his insistence on the importance of an intermediate area of experiencing, a claim for what its characteristics are, and how a baby comes to be able to participate in it, and its extension to its continuing relevance for humans throughout their lives. The special qualities of the relationship relate to what the infant may want, and may be inferred as wanting, and what part the parents play in this through their acceptance of the child’s control of how this possession is to be dealt with, and how its fate is to become unimportant. This opens out to the wider arena of adult life, art, culture, religion, that is not really developed in either version.

In a restatement of his position in the letter to Money Kyrle quoted above, he says, “as well as the capacity for interpersonal relationships and of the fantasy elaboration of his as well as the personal inner world of psychic reality there is a third equally important thing, which is experience. Experience is a constant trafficking in illusion, a repeated reaching to the interplay between creativity and that which the world has to offer. Experience is an achievement of ego maturity to which the environment supplies an essential ingredient. It is not be any means always achieved” (in Winnicott 1987/1987b [1952], p. 43).

The last substantive change is the omission of a description of psychopathology with reference to transitional phenomena that comprised the final paragraph of the first Summary and the introduction in 1971 of a completely new sentence about the “further idea” of “paradox” a word that does not feature at all in the 1953 version, nor even get a listing in the table of contents of the 1955 Collected Works (Reeves, personal communication, 2007).

While version one contains the sentence, “a positive value of illusion can therefore be stated” version two says, “What emerges from these considerations is the further idea that paradox accepted can have positive value. The resolution of paradox leads to a defence organisation which in the adult one can encounter as true and false self organisation”. A reference to DW’s 1960 paper on that topic follows.

In his 2002 article in the IJPA, John Turner points to the decreasing recourse to illusion in Winnicott’s work and the growing concern with play and all that play can accommodate. This apparent disappearance is not because illusion becomes less important; rather, its very importance, especially as regards psychic reality, according to Turner, is what makes its use inappropriate. “Illusion” he adds, “became occluded behind the play that it enabled” (p. 1076). I think Turner comes close to implying that in the psychoanalytic climate of the fifties, the word and its associations, not least to Freud’s “The Future of an Illusion” was a hindrance to the importance of Winnicott’s ideas being clearly conveyed.

A close reading of the two versions would seem to confirm Turner’s reading and encourage further investigation of how the shift from “illusion” to “paradox” and “play” may be understood not only as widening the arena of psychoanalysis and of its links with art and culture, but of extending the scope of what happens in the consulting room and what the basis of analytic work is. “Play” offers greater possibilities, theoretically and for work in the consulting room, and it also avoids the association of “illusion” with “delusion” but also with narcissism and infantile omnipotence.

Winnicott describes the shift which occurs from the baby’s use of its own thumb to the later use of something beyond itself and he sees this shift as interesting in relation to how it happens. The shift from one to the other may be a matter of developmental processes, the links between motility and aggressive reaching out, and the beginnings of an awareness of the environment as separate and objective. These are familiar aspects of his model, but here, they create or open up a space whose characteristics are also of interest. The space that exists between one thing and another, an intermediate/in between area that can be designated as spatial, has to emerge since Winnicott proposes that, initially, no space exists between thumb and mouth for the baby, but between mouth and TO, or first possession a space has opened up. This is clearly not just a reference to the thumb as attached to the baby. He uses the word “between” several times to convey the sense of the something more that happens for the infant in the time frame that is lived between “inability” and “growing ability” to recognise and accept reality (p. 230). It is this he links with “illusion” and it is fundamental to his account of the infant’s coming to have a sense of self through a process that is not, primarily, about object relating, but about what he calls “functional experiences” and the processes through which they come to be given a meaning (one may suppose p. 232).

In the second edition of The Language of Winnnicott Abram identifies the first explicit use of “illusion” in “Their standards and Yours” (1945f [1944]), originally broadcast as a talk.

Not being able to be entirely at the beck and call of the infant, she gives the breast at regular intervals, which is the next best thing, and she often succeeds in giving the baby a short period of illusion in which he does not have to recognize yet that a dream breast does not satisfy, however lovely the dream. He cannot get fat on a dream breast (Their standards and yours 1944, quoted in Abram 2007).

The first reference to the term had appeared earlier, in 1931, in a footnote, a footnote, it is to be noted, that appears in the negative, in the paper, “The Rheumatic Clinic”, “For the body at best is a bundle of aches….This is a typical cry of the disillusioned” (quoted in Abram 2007, p. 201). We could read this very early statement in conjunction with Winnicott’s linking of disillusionment with weaning both in this paper and in “Psychoses and Child care” (1952) where he says: “Just behind weaning is the wider subject of disillusionment. Weaning implies successful feeding and disillusionment implies the successful provision of opportunity for illusion” (p. 221). It is the necessity for both illusion and for disillusion that is formative.

Turner locates Winnicott’s use of illusion and the importance he assigns to it in the word’s changing history in English from the early modern period, and he emphasises particularly, Winnicott’s and Milner’s relation to the English tradition of romanticism. He emphasises the difference between Milner’s account in her 1952 paper, “Aspects of symbolism in comprehension of the not-self”, revised in 1955 as, “The role if illusion in symbol formation” (Milner 1987) and Winnicott’s advance on it. Turner says:

For Milner the issue is the classical problem of two different kinds of thinking. I do not want to deny the utility or the truth of Milner’s typology but rather to ask whether difference is the only relationship that we can imagine between her two kinds of thinking and seeing. (Turner 2002)

For Turner, Winnicott’s emphasis on intermediate space, beautifully described as “an area where the self can mix itself with the stuff of the world” (2002, p. 1072) escapes the dualism of Milner’s account, and Turner proposes Wordsworth as Winnicott’s predecessor for the coexistence of these modes of thinking (2002, p. 1071).

“Illusion in his work”, claims Turner, “does not constitute an alienation of the mind from reality; rather, it is the bridge between them, corroborating the individual sense of creative power within the holding environment of the world. It is illusion that creates the breast and then the transitional object, gradually through further disillusion and diminution of intensity, extends its range into the playing of the small child... an intermediate activity of playing as an inseparable blend of fantasy and real work done in the real world in real time and space”. (p. 1073)

In the volume Winnicott and Paradox (Clancier & Kalmanovitch 1984, English edition 1987, Tavistock)) the French thinkers interviewed suggest that while the TO itself is limiting and has led to all sorts of excesses, transitional space has proved a much more fertile ground for elaboration. The emphasis, shared in different ways, is on the necessity for the something extra that is contained in the idea of “potential” (and its links with play). Diatkine says:

Unfortunately striking new ideas are very soon reified by those lacking his inventive genius. This has happened in the case of the transitional objects or spaces. Winnicott brought out in a most impressive way that beside what was dramatically internal or external there was a field of cathexes and activities for which the question did not arise. Nowadays they have become a sort of holdall for less original minds. (p. 117)

Pontalis, for instance, suggests that the move from version one to version two is a greater emphasis on space as opposed to object, and this produces his insistence that mental activity is significant only if it is not only mental (p. 140). Widlocher speaks of a communication as not only a communication of information, (p. 146). Green summarises:

If one approaches this question from the side of the border between inside and outside, of the intermediate area as an area of intersection between the outside and the inside, in which the problems of impingement, intrusion, separation, abandonment, come into play, at the frontiers of the subject’s possibilities, one can understand the importance of Winnicott’s thought without attaching to the anecdotal aspect of the TO, which is of course something that has its own value, but above all has an interest in so far as it refers to the space of which it forms part and to the time when it begins to function. (Green 1984, p. 123)

Play inhabits this “intermediate zone”, this transitional space, which is so significant in the developmental processes through which the child begins to relate, psychologically and somatically, with objects in the external world. But equally significant is its importance in indicating the developmental processes that have preceded the child’s moves towards it: To arrive at a capacity to inhabit this intermediate/transitional area, and, later, to play, involves those processes of illusion and disillusion that for Winnicott form the basis of the mother child relation. This “third area” has a structural as well as a developmental instrumentality, in that it informs all kinds of adult cultural experience. Cultural experience, he suggested, is located in “the potential space between the individual and the environment”, a space of “maximally intense experiences”.

In his book on play Johan Huizinga argues for adding homo ludens to the descriptive formulations, homo sapiens and homo fabro, a claim for the fundamental place of play in the human species. Huizinga describes play as a voluntary activity executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, bound by freely accepted rules, having its aim in itself, and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is different from ordinary life. (Play is always exciting; it is exciting not because of the background of instinct, but because of precariousness that is inherent in it.) He sees it as fundamental (p. 28). It is a treasure retained in the memory, that can be repeated at any time. This faculty of repetition is one of its most essential qualities (p. 10). Play is a cultural phenomenon, but it is also a new creation of the mind that we can and do return to.

This echoes Winnicott’s thoughts about play as they appear in “Playing a theoretical statement” and “Playing, creative activity and the search for the self”, chapters three and four of Playing and Reality. He too emphasises play as voluntary, primary, and related to a particular condition of the mind. His account links the world of infantile experience and the world of art and culture, making the later forms depend upon and grow out of the earliest. Playing and cultural experience can be given a location that is both in the mind and not in the mind, a location associated with an intermediate area of experiencing (but where does the experiencing occur) that belongs neither to the external world of reality nor to the internal world of the person, but participates in both. That intermediate area of experience is where play happens and the possibility of its existence “there”, the possibility of someone being able to play there (and therefore elsewhere) grows out of what the potential space between child and mother, which emerges, “when experience has produced in the child a high degree of confidence in the mother that she will not fail to be there if suddenly needed” (p. 36). The processes that begin in that space a space created on the basis of experience, initially the space of illusion, make it possible for a person to live creatively, to participate in and make us of the arena loosely demarcated by the term “culture”, and to engage in psychoanalysis, “that highly specialised form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others”.

In using the word culture I am thinking of the inherited tradition, I am thinking of something that is in the common pool of humanity into which individuals and groups may contribute and from which we all draw if we have somewhere to put what we find (1967, p. 99).

This notion of having somewhere to put what we find incorporates, it seems to me, two distinct but related arenas, the one a particular kind of internal experience and disposition, the other knowledge of the cultural product and a proficiency in using it. Knowing and experiencing something also depends upon knowing the field; knowing the field also means knowing how to make use of that field. Art as a phenomenon of the in-between can provide something fundamental through its pulling together of external and internal, but its availability for such use depends upon there being somewhere in ourselves to “put” an experience. Knowledge and familiarity are aspects of having a place (an internal place) for both artist and viewer to put the symbolic object, which is imbued with the creativity of one or many participants, while, simultaneously, having
the capacity to engage the other, that is to elicit the capacity of the other to engage with it and use it for his or her own internal purposes.

This capacity is not only the condition for being able to use and enjoy the world of art and the ordinary world and its pleasures but it is also the condition for being able to engage in depth in the process of analysis. Some of our patients and some of Winnicott’s show us the restrictions and the impoverishments that can be the result of pathologies that stem from problems in these very early processes. Perhaps it is far more difficult to record the impact in the consulting room of the ordinary processes of infant care which lead to normal health but it is the elaboration of a theory of the early conditions that produce health and the healthy individual and the place of art and intermediate experience in facilitating an ongoing encounter with the self that is distinctive about Winnicott’s work in this area.

 

References

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Correspondence to
E-mail: lesley@pyrland.demon.co.uk

Enviado em 20/5/2007
Aprovado em 15/7/2007