Playing and Reality

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.