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III Abb. Comparison between Winnicot 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 re- arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him” (Freud 1908, p. 143f.). 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 come 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. III. Abc. Marion Milner and Contemporary Elaborations by Alvarez and Parsons Marion Milner’s interests parallel Winnicott’s accounts of potential space and transitional phenomena and how they enable the use of symbols through the creative play that initially opens up in the space between mother and baby . Her article, “Aspects of symbolism in the comprehension of the Not-Self” was published in the IJP festschrift for Melanie Klein’s 70th birthday (1952). Republished in “New Directions in Psychoanalysis” (1955) edited by Klein, Heimann, Money-Kyrle, its title had become, ‘The role of illusion in symbol formation.’ Indirectly both titles take up a theme about the origins of human creativity and its links with the constitution of the self, and the distinction between Me and Not Me that Winnicott insists is fundamental to thinking symbolically. While Milner’s original title indicated a different emphasis from Klein through its mention of the NOT Self, a formulation associated with Winnicott, the addition of ‘illusion’ deepened this association, harkening back to Klein’s 1930 paper, “The Importance of symbol formation in the development of the ego” and her claims there for the ego’s early development,
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