On Potential Space

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.