Donald Winnicott - Playing and Reality

Playing and Reality

A central theme running through Winnicott's work was the idea of play. Departing radically from orthodox psychoanalytic thought at the time, which held that analysis helped patients mainly by making them more aware of and insightful about their unconscious beliefs and wishes, Winnicott thought that playing was the key to emotional and psychological well-being. By "playing," he meant not only the ways that children of all ages play, but also the way adults "play" through making art, or engaging in sports, hobbies, humor, meaningful conversation, et cetera. At any age, he saw play as crucial to the development of authentic selfhood, because when people play they feel real, spontaneous and alive, and keenly interested in what they're doing. He thought that insight in psychoanalysis was helpful when it came to the patient as a playful experience of creative, genuine discovery. Winnicott saw a danger in psychoanalysis as it was being practiced in his time: Patients could feel pressured to comply with their analyst's authoritative interpretations, whether or not the patient experienced them as useful or enlivening or true to their own experience, and in this way analysis could end up merely reinforcing a patient's false self disorder. Winnicott believed that it was only in playing that people are entirely their true selves, so it followed that for psychoanalysis to be effective, it needed to serve as a mode of playing.

One example of how Winnicott used play in his work was the "squiggle game" in his child consultations (Winnicott 1958: ch. 9). He would draw a shape and invite the child to make something of it; or, conversely, the child would draw a shape for Winnicott to do something with'. Later analysts would develop the idea in the sense of using 'these incomplete "shapes" in our work with patients...a half-way step to interpretation - for the patient to do something with - rather than the analyst monopolizing insight in a session'.

Another, more famous instance was the "spatula" game, where Winnicott would place a "spatula" (tongue depressor)—an object always available in a pediatrician's office—within a child's reach for him to play with. 'You may be sure that if he is just an ordinary baby he will notice the attractive object...and he will reach for it'. Thereafter 'he will suddenly be overcome by reserve... in the course of a little while he will discover what he wants to do with it'. From this Winnicott derived his idea of how 'the infant needs "a period of hesitation" in which to rediscover' - again a concept transferred to analytic work: ' the analyst needs to tolerate what Winnicott speaks of as "the period of hesitation"...allowing the patient to use the analyst as someone who is there to be found... to be shoved down patients' throats'.

Many of Winnicott's writings show his efforts to understand what helps people to be able to play, and on the other hand what blocks some people from playing. He came to consider that 'Playing takes place in what he called the "potential space" between the baby and the mother-figure....he initiation of playing is associated with the life experience of the baby who has come to trust the mother figure'. In other words, babies can be playful when they're cared for by people who respond to them warmly and playfully, like a mother who smiles and says, "Peek-a-boo!" when she sees her baby playfully peeking out from behind his hands. If the mother never responded playfully, sooner or later the baby would stop trying to elicit play from her. "Potential space" was Winnicott's term for a sense of an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others. Similarly, in analysis: 'Creative play does not necessarily mean always playing alone; and this is the nature of an analysis when all is going well'.

Playing can also be seen in the use of a "transitional object," Winnicott's term for an object, such as a teddy bear, that has a quality for a small child of being both real and made-up at the same time. Winnicott pointed out that no one demands that a toddler explain whether his Binky is a "real bear" or a creation of the child's own imagination, and went on to argue that it's very important that the child is allowed to experience the Binky as being in an undefined, "transitional" status between the child's imagination and the real world outside the child. For Winnicott, one of the most important and precarious stages of development was in the first three years of life, when an infant grows into a child with an increasingly separate sense of self in relation to a larger world of other people. In health, the child learns to bring her spontaneous, real self into play with others; in a false self disorder, the child has found it unsafe or impossible to do so, and instead she feels that when she's with other people she must hide her own self, and pretend to be whatever others want or need her to be. A "transitional object" is an early and important bridge between self and other, and helps a child develop the capacity to be genuine in relationships, and creative. : 'In health there is an evolution from the transitional phenomenon, and the use of objects, to the whole play capacity of the child'.

Such 'playing with a "transitional object"...a transitional object to help him cope with separation' was for Winnicott a vital aspect of healthy development into independence. The alternative which he saw was the imitative leap forward to 'a rather ludicrous impersonation. Such incorporation of one person by another can account for that spurious maturity that we often meet with....There is the child, for instance, who, unconsciously fearing and fleeing from sex play, jumps right over to a spurious sexual maturity'. The result, for Winnicott, could be the creation of what he called 'the False Self....Other people's expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of our being.

Thus to Winnicott, 'for maturity it is necessary the individuals shall not mature early...passed through all the immature stages, all the stages of maturity at the younger ages'. Where that had failed to happen, in the false self, the task of the therapist was to 'enable the patient to become able to play, after which psychotherapy may begin...it is in playing that the patient is being creative'.

Playing for Winnicott ultimately extended all the way up from earliest childhood to 'the abstractions of politics and economics and philosophy and culture...this third area, that of cultural experience which is a derivative of play'.