An Appreciation of John Turner's Paper, 'Wordsworth and Winnicott in the Area of Play'

This is an unusual paper with far more significance for psychoanalysis than its modest title announces. I had had the opportunity of hearing the paper read and discussed and also of reading it soon afterwards, so I approached it again after considerable thought. Its four chapters have a telling symmetry.

The paper begins with an account of Wordsworth's Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, bringing out the importance of paradox for the conveyance of its meaning. Turner refers to Coleridge's antipathy to some of the paradoxes (due to his 'polarizing logic of depression') and to Colie's appreciation of it as 'play across category boundary-lines'. He finds that the function of paradox in the ode is 'to instigate a revaluation of those values upon which a liberal civilization rests'. He goes on to suggest three aspects to the paradox, 'the Child is father to the Man', the third of which is, I think, specially important for psychoanalysis: it is that self-understanding entails 'the capacity to relive the past as it is now'.

The second chapter, 'Wordsworth and paradox, the cultural context', gives both an historical and a biographical context for the ode, showing that certain crises in Wordsworth's life faced him repeatedly with the test of disillusion as the betrayal of central trust and that he met these crises by rediscovering his powers of imagination—not just the faculty of imagination, idealized by Coleridge, but its relationships —namely those of 'the images that feed or famish the imagination'. This emphasis on the relational is seen as 'a major cultural shift towards seeing thought as symbolic'. (This section seems important in view of the stress which Rycroft lays on the imagination.)

The third chapter, 'Winnicott and the play of paradox', considers his book, Playing and Reality, not only for its content but mainly for its style; one paradox of that is that the reader has to wait for 100 pages before his irritation and curio