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It was indeed fortunate that Dr. Winnicott was able to see this fascinating book through the press before his death. It was planned for many years, and is based on a gradual formulation and bringing together of his ideas in this important area, since Dr. Winnicott sees play as a function of child and adult alike, and as closely linked with culture.
As always Dr. Winnicott shows his ability to observe with a fresh and innocent eye, unblinkered by accepted theory which often restricts the focus of our attention. He changes that focus with enormous enlightenment to us as observers. In addition he has the poet's subtlety, and the poet's humility in leaving certain paradoxes, certain unillumined areas, and allowing them to remain on the borders of our present understanding.
Dr. Winnicott describes the book as a development of his paper “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”, saying that the area of individual development and experience seems to have been neglected by analysts, while attention was focussed on psychic reality and its relation to external, or shared, reality. He sees a continuum between transitional phenomena, playing, and later cultural experience, and feels that the latter has not found its true place in analytic theory.
Dr. Winnicott states that he wishes to reverse the sequence psychoanalysis— psychotherapy—play material—playing, saying that it is play that is universal and that facilitates growth, while psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialised form of playing in the service of communication. He thinks that when a patient cannot “play” this is a major symptom which must be dealt with first (play is used here to describe much of the thinking brought by both children and adults during treatment). Dr. Winnicott points out that playing is inherently exciting and precarious, and that this does not derive from instinctual arousal “but from the precariousness that belongs to the interplay in the child's mind of that which is subjective