You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This chapter reads D. W. Winnicott’s ‘squiggle game’ as evidence that unearths the negative labor of witnessing that lies at the heart of the analytic situation, offering a glimpse into the processes by which unremembered events become psychologically significant. Two kinds of data are explored: the first is a set of drawings that Winnicott slipped into his notebook during World War II; the second is a published series of images created two decades later in a therapeutic consultation with a patient named Eliza. Both sets of evidence remind us of the impossibility of witnessing historical rupture, even as they also document ‘creative struggles’ to engage this impossibility through visual representation. It is argued that Winnicott’s wartime work set the stage for his later formulation of the squiggle game, and an analysis of this relation sheds light on the significance of the visual realm as a site of memory.
‘This game that I like playing has no rules’ (Winnicott 1968: 301– 302). The game would later be described as D. W. Winnicott’s ‘most famous technical invention’ (Phillips 1988: 15). Winnicott himself gave it a more humble name: ‘the squiggle game’ (1968: 302). In this game with no rules, the analyst would sketch a rudimentary doodle onto a torn sheet of paper and then hand it over to his young patient with an invitation to ‘make it into anything.’ Then the roles were reversed and it was the child’s turn to make a doodle to hand over to Winnicott for elaboration. All the way along, Winnicott invited his patients to talk about the meaning of these constructions. The purpose of this game, in Winnicott’s words, was to allow for the child’s
‘communication of significance’ of early life relationships captured in visual form (Winnicott 1968: 302). Because this was a game with ‘no rules,’ the history scripted onto its pages does not return us to an untrammeled origin. Quite the opposite: the squiggle etches onto the historical record forces over which a child has no