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Be what you would seem to be—or, if you'd like it put more simply—Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
New York-based Cindy Sherman ranks among today's most successful contemporary artists. Sherman's oeuvre—consisting primarily of photographs of herself in a variety of guises and disguises—has provoked questions of alienation, female identity, and transformation in a postmodern age. Some art historians have labeled her narcissistic due to her self-consciousness and overemphasis on self-portraiture (Larson 1987; Dan to 1991, 8). Contrarily, postmodernists have believed her work to be self-abnegating for they insist it is fiction, about representation and, therefore, about nobody in particular . Feminists have perceived her art in terms of the deindividualization of women in society and claimed that in a patriarchal culture, woman is nothing more than “image” (Mulvey 1991). It is not my intention to dispute any of the above-mentioned views; I think all three have offered valuable insights into Sherman's work. As a psychoanalyst who writes about art, I would like to consider Sherman's work from yet another perspective—the perspective of play. In this paper, I hope to demonstrate that Sherman's art represents an arena, much like Winnicott's potential space, a location existing between mother and child, external and internal reality, in which