Concept
Potential space
The hypothetical area between infant and mother, and later between inner and outer reality, that opens as the baby begins to separate and is filled by play. Winnicott located there the transitional phenomena of infancy and, in adult life, the experience of art, religion and culture. Its paradox, that what is found there is at once created and found, is to be accepted rather than resolved.
Read more- Introduced by
- Donald Winnicott
- Key works
- 5
introduced by
- Donald Winnicott 1967 Worked out in 'The Location of Cultural Experience' (1967) and the later chapters of Playing and Reality.
developed by
- Thomas H. Ogden 1985 Ogden recast Winnicott's potential space as a dialectical tension between reality and fantasy, and between me and not-me, in which a symbolising, interpreting subject can come into being. He traced its collapse in various forms of psychopathology.
gave rise to
- Analytic third 1994 Ogden modelled the analytic third on Winnicott's idea that there is no infant apart from the mother-infant unit, and on the intermediate area that unit creates.