Playing and RealityD.W. Winnicott's distinctive contribution to our understanding of human development, based on extensive clinical work with babies and young children, is known and valued the world over. In Playing and Realityhe is concerned with the springs of imaginative living and of cultural experience in every sense, with whatever determines an individual's capacity to live creatively and to find life worth living. The ideas expressed here extend the theme first put forward in his paper 'Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena' published in 1953. They relate to an area of experience that has for centuries been a recurrent preoccupation of philosophers and poets. This intermediate area, between internal and external reality, is intensely personal, since its existence depends, as does the use that can be made of it, on each individual's early life experiences. If children can utilize this realm to initiate their relationship with the world, first through transitional objects, and later through play and shared playing, then cultural life and enjoyment of the cultural heritage, will be open to them. |
Contents
Creative Activity and the Search for the Self | 53 |
The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications | 86 |
The Place where we Live | 104 |
Interrelating apart from Instinctual Drive and in terms | 119 |
Contemporary Concepts of Adolescent Development | 138 |
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Common terms and phrases
able actual adolescent adult analyst baby baby's become belongs bisexuality breast capacity cathected child clinical concept creative living cultural experience deal defence dependence depressed described destruction Diana dissociation dream early environment environmental exist external reality fact fantasying feel felt female element Francis Bacon Gerard Manley Hopkins girl give gradually happens Hogarth Press human idea identification immaturity important individual infant instinct intermediate area interpretation introjected look male element material matter maturity meaning Melanie Klein mental mother not-me object-relating objectively perceived omnipotence parents patient pattern penis envy perhaps person phase playing potential space projective identification psychiatric psycho psychoanalytic psychotherapy pure female reality principle refer relation relationship Sarah sense separation session sleep split-off stage statement string survival symbol talking teddy teddy bear theme theory therapist thing transitional object transitional phenomena unconscious Winnicott woman word