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progress towards experiencing… It seems that symbolism can only be properly studied in the process of the growth of an individual, and that it has at the very best a variable meaning.” (1953, p. 233-234) In “Playing and Culture” (1968) Winnicott describes symbols as “standing at one and the same time for external world phenomena and for the phenomena of the individual person” (1971, p. 147). Highlighting the intermediate area/space, he writes: “this intermediate area is neither dream nor relating. At the same time that it is neither the one nor the other of these two it is both” (Winnicott, 1971, p 204). As Malcolm Bowie commented in a lecture to the Squiggle Foundation, “If Winnicott’s potential space looks back to the primitive condition of minds, it also looks forward to minds in their most elaborately cultivated forms” (Bowie 2000, p. 15). Because of early infantile experience, a way of being in the world comes to be established and, once established, can be drawn on, both in times of so-called stress and anxiety, and more generally as part of a continual interaction with the world and its otherness. III. Abb. Comparison Between Winnicott and Freud In “Creative writers and day dreaming”, Freud (1908) begins with the first traces of imaginative activity in childhood, arguing that ‘The child’s best loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games, he creates a world of his own or rather rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him’ (Freud, 1908, p. 143). The child takes this seriously and it involves considerable emotional investment. For Freud, the child distinguishes play from reality, linking his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. Play may be what creative writers and children share, but the opposite of play is not what is serious, but what is real. What Freud calls the ‘unreality’ of the writer’s imaginative world has important consequences in that “it allows events to happen and be enjoyed there which would be distressing if they really happened” (ibid, p. 144). The distinction is between reality and play: reality and unreality comprise respectively the real world and the play world. It is the unreality of the imaginative world which makes it a source of pleasure. However, for Winnicott it is the reality of the imaginative world that is central. The child’s move towards a transitional object is progressive because it relates to a real object, and, in indicating a significant developmental step points to the discovery of potential space, the space of illusion in which that first object and later play comes to exist. Winnicott and Freud are each dealing with the idea of unconscious life and its relation with so called reality. Both agree that if phantasies prevail, the result is illness and pathology, but it is the status of the other pole, that involving illusion, the use of symbols and symbolisation that Winnicott makes central as the framework for his overall approach to psychoanalysis. In associating dreaming with living, potential space enables health, aliveness and the continual elaboration of new objects.
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