On Potential Space

In this paper, I have proposed that Winnicott's concept of potential space might be understood as a state of mind based upon a series of dialectical relationships between fantasy and reality, me and not-me, symbol and symbolized, etc., each pole of the dialectic creating, informing, and negating the other. The achievement of such a dialectical process occurs by means of a developmental advance from the 'invisible oneness' of the mother-infant unit to the subjective 'three-ness' of the mother-and-infant (as symbolic objects) and the infant (as interpreting subject). Failure to create or maintain the dialectical process leads to specific forms of psychopathology that include the experience of the fantasy object as a thing in itself, the defensive use of reality that forecloses imagination, the relationship to a fetish object, and the state of 'non-experience'. The 'processing' of a projective identification is understood as the re-establishment of the recipient's capacity to maintain a dialectical process (e.g. of me and not-me) that had been limited in the course of the recipient's unconscious participation in the projector's externalized unconscious fantasy.