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In 1993, I introduced a new concept, Le Travail du négatif (The work of the negative) which became the title of a book published at the time (Green, 1993a). In the introductory chapter of this book, I declared that one of the sources that guided me in my elaboration was Winnicott, to whom I was indebted—specifically to his Playing and Reality.1 Nevertheless, if one turns to two recent dictionaries on Winnicott’s work, written by Alexander Newman (1995) and Jan Abram (1996), there is no mention in them of the negative.
Let us go back to Playing and Reality. In the first sentence of the Introduction, Winnicott writes: ‘This book is the development of my paper “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena” ’.2 If we read that article carefully we shall be able to find the thread, whether apparent or invisible, which runs through the whole book. In fact, this paper has a particular history. It is dated 1951, in its initial version. This text will later be the first chapter of Playing and Reality in 1971, in a modified form bearing the same title. The 1951 paper appears in 1971 as the first section of the chapter under another title: ‘Original hypothesis’,3 with two new sections entitled: ‘II. An application of the theory’, and ‘III. Clinical material: aspects of fantasising’, in which the negative is introduced. Section II had already been published in 1960 and 1965, separately. This section starts with a few lines of introduction followed by a sub-section: ‘Psychopathology manifested in the area of transitional phenomena’. The beginning of this subsection substantially modifies the last lines of the 1951–53 paper in which Winnicott wrote initially about the application of his ideas in psychopathology, that is, ‘addiction, fetishism and pseudologia fantastica and thieving’. In Playing and Reality, these applications are suppressed and instead Winnicott focuses on separation and loss. He brings the idea of a limited tolerance to separation in terms of the duration of t