Play and Reflection in Donald Winnicott's Writings

Andre Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367105518
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917332
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The third book in the Winnicott Clinic Lecture Series contains a lecture from the author on Winnicott's theory on play. He discusses Winnicott's view on the importance of play and then moves on to presenting his own, somewhat contradictory, view on it. The author provides an innovative and provocative perspective on the subject, inviting people to think independently rather than accepting theories already laid out for them.

Play and reflection in Donald Winnicott’s writings

André Green

In writing Donald Winnicott’s commemoration I find that I strongly identify with him. Throughout his life Winnicott struggled against compliance, conformism, and submission. It is scarcely surprising there has not been any Winnicottian school and that no one is called his disciple, even those closest to him. As I feel a certain continuity exists between Winnicott and myself, I shall not provide a submissive account of his ideas, even though I do think he was the most creative mind in psychoanalysis, after Freud.

When Winnicott gave his first lecture to the British Psychoanalytical Society, on 28 November 1945, on the subject of “Primitive emotional development”, he said it was like the introduction to a book. He expounded his original method: ideas were not formed from other theories. He confessed that in building his own theory, he gathered elements from various sources and “related them to his clinical experience”, but was prepared to examine in due course the few things he “stole” here and there from others. However, my concern here is not what Winnicott is said to have “stolen” from others, but rather what his own theory chose to leave out and would not embrace.

Today I am going to talk about Winnicott’s last work, which I consider a sort of testament: Playing and Reality (1971). I shall focus attention mainly on playing and not so much on reality—despite Winnicott’s locating play, like other transitional phenomena, between inner and outer reality; outer reality does not seem to me limited to objectively perceived objects. I think it is in the presence of horror that we understand the necessity of play in making it bearable.

Winnicott had been interested in play ever since 1942 (Why Children Play) but I am more interested in his last statements about it. Two central chapters are devoted to play in Playing and Reality. One of them, “Playing: a theoretical statement”, is constantly quoted at length and is considered to be the most detailed study on the topic. The other chapter, “Playing: creative activity and the search of the self”, is, quite surprisingly, almost never mentioned; maybe it provokes little comment because it is obscure and difficult. Although the two chapters are very different it is my feeling that, bearing the same title, they must be tightly linked. I shall consider this two-sided development as the axis of my elaboration. I believe that many of the other chapters of the book, whether before or after this central couple, are enlightened by reference to them.

First, I want to make a statement to indicate where I stand. On the one hand I accept the profound originality and the creativity of most of the concepts introduced by Winnicott in psychoanalysis; on the other, I disagree with Winnicott’s explanation of their supposed origin in the mother–baby relationship.

I think that it was thanks to Winnicott’s experience of the analytic situation—and we perhaps may say his own experience first as an analysand—that he was able, when looking at children, to notice what had been escaping everyone else’s attention.

In Human Nature (1988), a book published posthumously, when considering the earliest stages, Winnicott moves towards the complete merging of the individual and the environment that is implied in the words “primary narcissism”. Winnicott compares it with the physical transformation of the endometrium intermingled with the placenta. This basic hypothesis appears to me as a fecundity for the later construction of transitional phenomena to which play is so closely linked:

There is an intermediate state between this and interpersonal relationships which has very great importance of which it could be said that between the mother who is physically holding the baby and the baby there is a layer which, we have to acknowledge, is an aspect of herself and at the same time an aspect of the baby. It is mad to hold this view and yet this view must be maintained. [Winnicott, 1988]

Let us consider this quotation. I think of it as what we may call the “unsaid” in Winnicott; something that he did not publish—yet all that he published derives from this basic hypothesis that, curiously, we do not find in his work. Everything he wrote on the transitional alternative area, the transitional phenomena and the symbolic union, is grounded in this “mad” view of something belonging at the same time to the mother and to the child. This, of course, poses questions for our ideas on identity and on the meaning of trying to reunite what has been separated.

I think it may be a surprise for many of you to see how I dissociate myself from this point of view. I believe that as a paediatrician Winnicott could not free himself from this viewpoint; he was determined to see things like that. However, I do not think, for instance, that playing is rooted in, or deeply influenced by, the mother–baby relationship.

That concept is one which Winnicott would not consider important in analysis with his adult patients—and probably in his own—and that is what created some misunderstandings, or some regrettable lacunae, in his theory. Such gaps, in my view, were shared with many other authors in the British Society. One such gap, for instance, is Winnicott’s dismissal of the part of sexuality in playing. At the beginning of the chapter “Playing: a theoretical statement”, Winnicott devotes a rather extensive section to the (negative) relationship between play and masturbation: “There is one thing I want to get out of the way” (Winnicott, 1988). He argues about the physical excitement of play, yet rejects the links in our mind between playing and masturbatory activity. He believes that “if, when a child is playing, the physical excitement of instinctual involvement becomes evident, then the playing stops”. He does not consider that the stopping of the play could be preventive of orgasm or equivalent to it. He does not think of the comparison between play and foreplay where, too, if the excitement is overwhelming, what we have is premature ejaculation, which brings an end to the sexual relationship. Moreover, Winnicott seems to ignore Freud’s concept of aim-inhibited drives, a very surprising matter since he develops at length the relationship between playing and friendship just as Freud did; he, for his part, quotes the same example: “friendship as an expression on aim-inhibited drives”. It is striking to see how much energy Winnicott spends in dissociating playing from sexuality. Ever since the time of Melanie Klein, around the 1930s, sexuality has been considered by British analysts as a secondary and rather unimportant matter, except in the case of perversions. Winnicott, therefore, recommends on the subject the works of those who are not analysts. Let me point out that Winnicott refuses the hypothesis of a preliminary or primary form of sublimation.

Though there may be a great deal to say about this—as can be inferred from biographies of Winnicott, as Rodman so excellently demonstrates—I shall systematically neglect all arguments related to his historical background and personality. If I disagree with the explanation grounded in the mother–baby relationship, I am not going to interpret Winnicott’s ideas according to this baby and mother relationship, however eloquent are the details we possess and their possible influence on Winnicott according to his own confessions to his friends.

My feeling about the importance of play in Winnicott is related to the fact that Winnicott himself was of a very playful nature. He once said of himself that he was “a clown” and that he understood how important it was to himself to have play as a remedy for his helplessness towards reality.

In the excellent compilations about playing in the works of Winnicott (for example, those by Alexander Newman and Jan Abram) different aspects related to that concept are described. I do not intend to re-examine the relationship of playing to these aspects, but will rather try to clarify what appear to me as the more fundamental characteristics as I see them.

I agree with Winnicott, at least partly, when he writes: “It is play that is the universal and that belon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Play and Reflection in Donald Winnicott’s Writings
• Vote of Thanks
• Addendum to Lecture