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.
Development
1967
introduced by Donald Winnicott
Worked out in 'The Location of Cultural Experience' (1967) and the later chapters of Playing and Reality.
In Playing and Reality (1971)
1985
developed by Thomas H. Ogden
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.
In On Potential Space (1985);The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue (1986)
Relations
- 1967 introduced by Donald Winnicott
Worked out in 'The Location of Cultural Experience' (1967) and the later chapters of Playing and Reality.
- 1985 developed by Thomas H. Ogden
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.
- 1994 gave rise to Analytic third
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.
- derives from Transitional object
Potential space generalises the intermediate area first described through transitional objects into the space of play, creativity and cultural life.
Works
- 1971
Playing and Reality (1971), published shortly after Donald Winnicott's death, gathers and extends his late thinking on the area of experience that lies between inner psychic reality and the shared external world. It opens with a revised version of his 1951 paper on transitional objects and transitional phenomena: the blanket, toy or tune an infant adopts as its first 'not-me' possession, which belongs neither wholly to the inner world nor wholly to the outer one. Winnicott insists that the paradox be respected: no one should ask the child whether the object was found or created. The capacity to use such an object depends on a good-enough mother who first lets the infant feel it creates what it needs, sustaining an illusion of omnipotence, and then gradually disillusions it. As the transitional object loses its meaning, the intermediate area it opened spreads over the whole field of play, art, religion and culture. The central chapters treat playing as a universal activity, the basis of health and the medium of psychotherapy, which in this view takes place where the playing of patient and therapist overlap; where a patient cannot play, the first task is to make playing possible. Only in playing, Winnicott argues, can a person be creative and use the whole personality, and only in being creative can the self be found. He contrasts creative apperception, which makes life feel worth living, with a compliance that leaves a sense of futility, and contrasts dreaming, which links to life, with a dissociated fantasying that leads nowhere. He distinguishes a female element, tied to being, from a male element, tied to doing, in people of either sex. In 'The Use of an Object' he separates relating to an object, still under the subject's omnipotent control, from using it, which becomes possible only after the subject destroys it in fantasy and it survives, and is thus placed in a world of shared reality. Further chapters locate cultural experience in the potential space between baby and mother, describe the mother's face as the first mirror in which the infant sees itself, and discuss adolescence as a period whose immaturity should be met rather than cured.
- 1985
Ogden proposes reading Winnicott's potential space as a state of mind built on a set of dialectical tensions, between fantasy and reality, me and not-me, symbol and symbolised, in which each pole creates, informs and negates the other. This state of mind arises through a developmental movement from the 'invisible oneness' of the mother-infant unit to a subjective 'three-ness': mother and infant as symbolic objects, together with the infant as an interpreting subject. Where the dialectic fails to arise or cannot be sustained, specific forms of psychopathology result: the fantasy object experienced as a thing in itself, a defensive use of reality that forecloses imagination, a relationship to a fetish object, and 'non-experience'. Ogden also recasts the recipient's 'processing' of a projective identification as the recovery of a capacity to sustain a dialectic, such as that of me and not-me, which had been narrowed while the recipient unconsciously took part in the projector's externalised unconscious fantasy.
- 1994
- 1994
The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts
Through two clinical sequences, Ogden illustrates the analyst's effort to recognise, understand and put into words, for himself and for the patient, the moment-to-moment interplay of three subjectivities: the analyst's, the analysand's, and the experience the two create together, which he calls the analytic third. In the first sequence the analyst reaches this jointly created experience partly through what seem to be his own private reveries, states that can look like narcissistic self-absorption, distraction, compulsive rumination or daydreaming. In the second, the analyst's somatic delusion, together with the patient's sensory experiences and bodily fantasies, becomes the principal route by which he comes to understand the leading anxieties being generated between analyst and patient.
See also
People
References
- Playing and Reality1971Evidence for a relation
- On Potential Space1985Evidence for a relation
- The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue1986Evidence for a relation
- Subjects of Analysis1994Evidence for a relation
- The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts1994Evidence for a relation