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complex creative interchange between what comes from inside and what comes from outside, a complex alternation of fusing and separating” (Milner, 1950;2010, p.171) Abandoning an insistence on a rigid separation between me and not me in the arena which Winnicott calls ‘transitional’, leads to acceptance of Me and Not Me as coexisting, and the creative process and its links with symbolisation as new, alive, containing life itself, something that exists for its own sake. The emphasis on “a way of functioning which is essential if something new is to be created” (Milner, 1987, p.214) Milner is not concerned with what is symbolised or the unconscious wishes informing it (ibid, p.214; p.211). Rather, the focus is on what is created. Anne Alvarez (1992, 1996) proposes that for Winnicott and Milner, the transitional object carries the meaning of that which is yet not the other and that which is and is not the self. Accordingly, Simon discovered the boundaries of the self through the freedom he found in his sessions to explore the boundaries between himself and Milner. Expanding on Winnicott’s transitional objects, Alvarez explored identifications of a transitional nature concerning the sense of self. In this vein, she explores ‘transitional states’, as a term for describing “the continuum from symbolic equation-type projective identifications (where the patient feels identical to a heroic ideal figure), through to more adult, depressive- position symbolic identifications where there is respect for the individuality of both object and self, and also for their differences …” (1996, p. 381). She follows up on her previous suggestion that the areas in between these two states involve potentially important transitions in the sense of self (1992), and stresses that we may need to be “as alert to identifications of a transitional nature for the sense of self, as we are to transitional features in the internal object” (1996, pp.381-382). Michael Parsons (2000), following Winnicott, attributes creativity to the constant interplay of paradoxical ideas in the transitional/potential space, a place where illusion can be maintained. He believes that both psychic reality and symbolism can be used defensively to avoid ordinary reality, but that ‘both are essential for an alive engagement with it’ (Parsons 2000, p.181), the reason being that both are ‘intrinsically dependent’ on the double function of negation . In his acceptance of this paradox in creative symbolism, he is close to Milner who in her classical 1952 paper also does not see symbolism as a defensive regression but as a necessary part of development of a creative relationship to the world. Like Milner, Parsons is interested in symbolisation as a creative act of the imagination. The unconscious meaning of a symbol will need to be analysed, and symbols may well have a defensive function. Overall, however, what matters more for Parsons is how understanding a symbol puts someone in touch with their imaginative capacities. Creative use of symbols in this way depends on accepting them as being real and not real at the same time. Parsons has linked symbolisation closely to his ideas about play, which depends on the same paradoxical freedom to be both real and nor real. This is the quality of Winnicott’s ‘transitional space’, and Parsons views playing with symbolisation in this area as an important way for someone to expand their creative imagination.
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