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emphasizes a potential space, an intermediate area that grows out of a hypothetical originary state of illusion, first enabled by the environment mother-baby setup and then by the baby’s gradual disillusion leading to a rudimentary awareness of differentiation. Using terms like symbolism, symbolic, symbolize, symbol throughout his writings, Winnicott provides fundamental contributions to understanding the symbolization process and its failures. His concept of transitional phenomena , which prominently includes the transitional space and transitional object, is essential for understanding the process of symbolization. It is also intimately related to the concepts of subjective object and objective object, also fundamental in this process. Winnicott (1953) states: “It is true that the piece of blanket (or whatever it is) is symbolical of some part-object, such as the breast. Nevertheless, the point of it is not its symbolic value so much as its actuality. It's not being the breast (or the mother) as important as the fact that it stands for the breast (or mother). When symbolism is employed, the infant is already clearly distinguishing between fantasy and fact, between inner objects and external objects, and between primary creativity and perception. But the term transitional object, according to my suggestion, gives room for the process of becoming able to accept difference and similarity. I think there is use for a term for the root of symbolism in time, a term that describes the infant's journey from the purely subjective to objectivity; and it seems to me that the transitional object (a piece of blanket, etc.) is what we see on this journey of 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. 91-92). 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, p15). 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.
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