On the Seashore of Endless Worlds, Children Play1

D. W. Winnicott: Playing and Reality New York: Basic Books, 1971. 169 pages, $6.95.

D. W. Winnicott: Therapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry New York: Basic Books, 1971. 410 pages, $15.00.

PLAYING AND REALITY is a loosely connected collection of Dr. Winnicott's articles and lectures, which to varying degrees relate to the book's title. It begins with his now-classic paper on transitional phenomena and transitional objects. Detailed here is Winnicott's description of that intermediate area of experiencing in the child's development: the phase between the period when the infant's only reality is his inner one and the time when he can clearly differentiate the external world as distinct from himself. During this intermediate phase, phenomena may have characteristics of both levels of cognition. The transitional object, e.g., the teddy bear or blanket, although an external object is not fully recognized as such—so invested is it with internally derived projections of the mother image. Art and religion, as well as psychological illusory experiences, are other examples of transitional phenomena. They have their derivates in the transitional infantile stage and are composites of the objective and the subjective. The child who develops a symbiotic tie with his mother, is not likely to involve himself with transitional objects. Such involvement is a step toward the formation of external object relations and he does not take