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CLINICAL NOTES SERIES (September 2016)

DONALD WINNICOTT ON PLAYING

Donald W. Winnicott (1971). ‘Playing: A Theoretical Statement,’ Playing and Reality (London: Routledge Classics, 2005), pp. 51-70.

INTRODUCTION

Donald W. Winnicott was a paediatrician by training before he became a psychoanalyst. Like most analysts who specialized in the analysis of children, he knew the importance of playing in not only the everyday lives of children, but as a tool of interpretation in the analytic clinic. So it is not difficult to appreciate the fact that he identified the ability to play as an important criterion of mental health in both children and adults. Winnicott however accorded much more importance to the act of playing in children since there was no other way of accessing their unconscious. The importance of play and playing was probably the only area in which there was consensus amongst the analysts of different schools who took on the onerous responsibility of developing the theory and practice of the analysis of children at the British Society for Psychoanalysis in London during the war years. A good point of entry into these theories would be to delineate what exactly they meant by the terms ‘play’ and ‘playing.’ Since a comparative analysis of play in the theories of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Donald Winnicott would be beyond the scope of these clinical notes, I focus here mainly on Winnicott’s theoretical statement on playing and leave the rest for another occasion. These notes should give both theorists and clinical practitioners a feel for what Winnicott’s notion of play is and why it is an important indicator of mental health or the lack thereof in young children. For Winnicott, when a child is able to resume the habit of playing – which might have been interrupted by distressing or traumatic circumstances – the analysis will make rapid progress or even

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attain some measure of closure. These notes summarize the main points raised by Winnicott in his theoretical statement on playing, though this is not the only paper that Winnicott wrote on this theme. Subsequent chapters of the book from which I excerpt this statement go deeper into his theory of play albeit in the context of the true self and creativity. It is important to remember that Winnicott’s preoccupation with transitional objects and transitional phenomena will not be readily comprehensible if we do not learn to appreciate the theory of play that serves as its theoretical background. That is because children mainly use toys to play and use them as transitional objects. It is however important to remember that it is not the toy or the teddy that really matters. What really matters is the use of the object rather than the object chosen per se. How exactly a child goes about using a transitional object is an indication of the level of creativity with which he is able to master the periodic absence of his mother. It would not be a stretch to say that it was actually Sigmund Freud who discovered the transitional object when he saw his grandson playing the ‘fort-da’ game with a spool of thread that he would throw away and then pick up repeatedly. Freud like Winnicott must have realized that what mattered was not the spool, but that it symbolized the opposition between the presence of the mother and the absence of the mother. What Winnicott does then is to think through the implications of such moments in the Freudian text albeit in the context of an empirical rather than a textual or dialectical approach to psychoanalysis.

PLAY AND PLAYING

What does Winnicott mean then by play and playing? How do these notions affect the space of the clinic? Winnicott points out at the very beginning of his paper that the space of psychotherapy includes that of the patient and the analyst. The communication between the analyst and the patient is compared to ‘two people playing together.’ The therapeutic imperative then, for Winnicott, is to make it possible for the patient to play if he is being held back by inhibitions. In other words, if the patient is able to play at the outset; then, it becomes a tool of interpretation. If the patient is not able to play at the beginning of the treatment; then, getting him to play becomes the aim of the therapy. Winnicott begins by citing the pre-existing literature which recognizes an analogy between concentration in adults and the feeling of absorption in play in young children. Winnicott however differentiates between the terms ‘play’ and ‘playing’ in both the analysis of children and adults. So, for instance, in the analysis of adults, the act of free-association can take on a playful aspect; this could relate to the actual words used; inflections in speech; and in the deployment of humour. Winnicott’s description of playing is related to his theory of transitional objects and transitional phenomena.

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His fond hope is that the analytic community will not only be able to make a connection between these theories, but accord the same importance to his account of ‘playing’ as they previously did to his work ‘on transitional objects and transitional phenomena.’ Winnicott then goes on to describe the modalities of playing in terms of space and time. The space of play for him is neither inside nor outside in the conventional sense of the term. What Winnicott has in mind is a space in between the baby and the mother. This is the space that will re-emerge in between the patient and the analyst in the clinic in the context of mutual playing.

PLAYING AS A CULTURAL UNIVERSAL

Winnicott pitches strongly for his theory of the transitional object and the process of playing as cultural universals because they represent how the baby relates to his mother. Whether a baby will grow up to be healthy will depend on how successful he is in the attempt to relate to his mother at this phase of development. Winnicott illustrates the phenomena that he has in mind with the help of case vignettes. So, for instance, in the case of a two and a half year old boy named Edmund the specific difficulty is that he will play only with his mother and not accept any substitutes including his grandmother. This specificity in object choice later becomes a character trait. It began as difficulties in weaning since he refused to be fed by a bottle. Winnicott worked out Edmund’s patterns of attachment and detachment to his mother by observing how exactly he would play with the toys in the clinic in the presence of his mother. In the case of five year girl named Diana, the teddies in the clinic gave Winnicott an opportunity to observe how she worked-through her mother’s pregnancy and prepared to look after her younger brother. In both these instances what is involved, argues Winnicott, are not the child’s instincts, but the opportunity to relate meaningfully to the presence of the mother. What is at stake in the child’s development is not only the ability to handle the transitional object, but also the capacity to be alone (albeit in the presence of the mother).

SURPRISED BY PLAYING

For Winnicott, playing is both a ‘creative experience’ and ‘a basic form of living.’ Playing is however a ‘precarious’ construct that is neither fully subjective nor open to an objective description by the analyst. Another important implication of play therapy is that it is not dependent on ‘clever interpretations’ on the part of the analyst. The efficacy of play therapy depends on whether or not the patient is able to ‘surprise himself’ in the act of playing. While these points are made specifically in the context of the analysis of children they have important implications for a theory of

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analysis as well. This is because Winnicott is committed to the proposition that a clinical interpretation can avoid the dangers of ‘compliance, indoctrination, and resistance’ only if it is within ‘the ripeness of material’ produced in the clinic. The importance of this clinical insight cannot be over-emphasized since it summarizes in a single sentence why many analyses cannot be completed or why they invariably fail. The analytic interpretation will be therapeutic only at the point at which the child has developed the capacity to play. Furthermore, in addition to a sense of mutuality between the analyst and the patient there must be spontaneity in the act of playing. In the absence of these pre-conditions, the analyst will not be able to intervene in a child’s unconscious. This is Winnicott’s version of the Freudian distinction between ‘what the patient knows’ and ‘what the analyst knows.’ It is the point at which the patient is ‘surprised’ by what he (unconsciously) knows without (consciously) knowing that he knew it, that he is deemed to be cured.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, Winnicott’s theory of playing begins with the child’s ‘preoccupation’ which is comparable to ‘concentration’ in adults. The term preoccupation is also used in Winnicott’s theory in the context of the ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ which is the state of mind in which an expecting mother prepares to give birth. The locus of play is neither inside nor outside. It is a shared space in between mother and child.

Transitional objects in the external world are used to work-through the child’s inner states; they are therefore imbued with the sense of dreams. The trajectory of development comprises ‘transitional phenomena, playing, shared playing,’ and then on to ‘cultural experiences.’ This trajectory depends on whether there is adequate trust between the mother and the child. The child’s ability to play depends on the state of his body and on whether he can handle the bodily excitement that accrues from play. If there is an increase in excitement, the child will not be able to play. In addition to excitement, there is the possibility of the

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child experiencing anxiety during play. Success in playing therefore depends on developing the ability to contain experiences that are the main sources of bodily excitement and anxiety. There is necessarily something ‘precarious’ in play since it combines the subjective experience of play with the objective reality of playing. Likewise, Winnicott’s clinical work is characterised by the relationship between a theory of playing and the play of theory in the analysis of children.

SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN