You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Transitional phenomena occupy a central place in the thought of Donald Winnicott (Winnicott 1951, 1971), and Winnicott himself sketched a developmental path from such early creations to the larger worlds of culture and religion (Winnicott 1967a, 1971). In the present paper I want to build on this idea and draw out its implications for the creative process.
According to Winnicott, transitional phenomena are constituted in the first year of life when certain ordinary objects become endowed with special significance. Winnicott regarded them as occupying a transitional place in symbolic development. Not yet separate enough to be fully fledged symbols, they are nevertheless more than mere objects, having been endowed by the infant with personal meaning.
Typically, the transitional object is the comforting bit of blanket that the infant mouths and caresses. Winnicott called it the ‘first “not-me” possession’ but he saw it as a very special possession which the infant had in some sense created.
The notion that the baby under certain circumstances might be able to create its objects is central to Winnicott's theory of personal development. Only when the baby is allowed such an experience can the world be endowed with personal meaning; and only then can there be a lively and creative involvement with the world.
It was not Winnicott, but another psychoanalyst, Michael Balint (1959), who coined the phrase ‘harmonious mix-up’ to capture this interpenetration of subject and object in early experience. Balint's term referred to the early relationship with the mother but could equally be applied to the transitional object. Indeed, Winnicott sometimes called such an object a subjective object precisely because of the mix-up of subjective and objective in its constitution. In the bit of blanket, for example, it seemed that the experienced sensory properties of the object - its softness, warmth, and perhaps its smell - somehow embodied an earlier subjective experience with th