Playing and Reality

I'll start off by saying I agree with D. Miles - this can be difficult reading at times. I'm not a psychoanalyst but I am a linguist so complicated language is something I am used to dealing with. I still find myself working hard when reading Playing & Reality. If you're willing to put in the effort, you'll find some fascinating ideas and interesting case studies that illustrate them. Franz Metcalf, in his review, has done an excellent job of explaining Winnicott's importance.

From back cover: "In this volume [D.W. Winnicott] is concerned with the springs of imaginative living and of cultural experience in every sense, with whatever determines an individual's capacity to live creatively and to find life worth living. The ideas expressed here extend the them first pub forward in his paper 'Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena' published in 1953.They relate to an area of experience that has been neglected in psychoanalytic thought, though it has for centuries been a recurrent preoccupation of philosophers and poets. This intermediate area, between internal and external reality, is intensely personal, since its existence depends, as does the use that can be made of it, on each individual's early life experiences. If the child can utilize this realm to initiate his relationships with the work, first through transitional objects, and later through play and shared playing, then cultural life, and enjoyment of the cultural heritage, will be open to him." **** CONTENTS: * Introduction 1 - Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena 2 - Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living: A Case-history describing a Primary Dissociation 3 - Playing: A Theoretical Statement 4 - Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for Self 5 - Creativity and Its Origins 6 - The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications 7 - The Location of Cultural Experience 8 - The Place Where We Live 9 - Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development 10 - Interrelating apart from Instinctual Drive and in terms of Cross-identification 11 - Contemporary Concepts of Adolescent Development and their Implications for Higher Education

First of all, this book is written for psychoanalysts. One of the other reviewers clearly hated it and summarily dismissed it as "not even worth thinking about." For someone not used to reading dense psychological text, this book would be tough to follow. Honestly, Winnicott is hard to follow even if you are used to reading dense psychological text. He's not particularly concise and often uses certain terms without explaining them. For example, he speaks about the infant's need to "destroy" the transitional object, but also to see the object survive the destruction. I interpret that to mean something about learning object permanence, but he's never clear. Having said that, I really like this book. It's a collection of essays and speeches and so isn't meant to be a completely coherent argument from start to finish. The chapters I like the best are where he develops his theory of play and creativity. In short, infants learn to distinguish themselves from their environment by having a "potential space" where it is safe to explore and play. Being able to be creative is how human beings discover their true, authentic self. And this is especially important for a developing infant. Winnicott contributed a significant amount to the field of object-relations therapy. I really dig his work, and his theory of the significance of play in the work of analysis not only makes sense to me, but also adds a level of fun and creativity. His written work is dense, and most of it was published in journals, so it can be hard to sift through. But I like this book the best ("Human Nature" is second). The concept of discovering your true, authentic self through play and exploration is a pretty liberating idea even as an adult, and Winnicott provides some solid developmental theory here to back that up. If you're studying Winnicott or object-relations, this is a great book to read.