Playing and Reality

[droqen]

Re: D. W. Winnicott's
"Playing and Reality"

[droqen]

[AB]

[droqen]

I don't normally read prefaces, but I suppose this one caught my heart on the way back from the library, so this time I will quote it -- to indicate my alliance with its spirit and my consequential excitement about reading this book.

This collection of essays . . . has been read and reread with profit by those interested in the ideas for their own sake, as well as all those who are trying to understand human beings in order to help them.

omg, it me (it both me)

In addition to a running description of his theory, Winnicott typically tells us over and over again what he means to get across. Each repetition adds some new element, as if in rehearsing these ideas he surprises himself with something new at the end of trajectory of thought he has built up to that point.

beautiful structure being described here, i love it. take me on a journey of discovery with a kindred mind.

. . . in the form of an object that is both created and discovered, . . . the characteristic that yields freedom and joy to babies and all who were once babies.

in The End of Gameplay, i return again and again to the bunny, to bunnies... "we were all bunnies." when i read some of Winnicott's other book, i had a moment where i felt "we were all babies" emerging as a construction; here, i love the preface's phrase (emphasis added above), "all who were once babies."

it's such a beautiful and context-giving way to say, simply, 'everyone.'

[droqen]

The mother provides what the baby is ready to imagine and in so doin she facilitates the baby's pleasure in a world that fosters its sense of omnipotence. . . . [and facilitates or observes] the transition from having all its needs automatically met, in utero, to a capacity to accept the otherness of the external world. . . over a long period of time during which the [baby's/child's] early sense of omnipotence was gradually succeeded by manageable frustrations.

The same mother who provided the object that was made transitional [(from omnipotent to frustratingly external?)] is the mother that fails to meets the baby's needs according to its ability to grow as a result of the graduated failures.

[droqen]

Chapter 1, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena"

It is upsetting how closely page 7 mirrors my experience of making games (art, i suppose)

[droqen]

p7

Summary of special qualities in the relationship

1. The infant assumes rights over the object, and we agree to this assumption. Nevertheless, some abrogation of omnipotence is a feature from the start.

[droqen]

2. The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated.

3. It must never change, unless changed by the infant.

4. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and, if it be a feature, pure aggression.

[droqen]

5. Yet it must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own.

6. It comes from without from our point of view, but not so from the point of view of the baby. Neither does it come from within; it is not a hallucination.

[droqen]

7. Its fate is to be gradually allowed to be decathected [decathect: to withdraw one's feelings of attachment from (a person, idea, or object), as in anticipation of a future loss], so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. By this I mean that in health the transitional object does not 'go inside' nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between 'inner psychic reality' and 'the external world as perceived by two persons in common', that is to say, over the whole cultural field.

At this point my subject widens out into that of play, and of artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, . . . etc.