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Fadi Abou-Rihan's new book asks what it would mean to put psychoanalytic thought and practice “in play” in ways that respond more sensitively to the challenges of Winnicott's signature concepts—playing, finding, the transitional, and the capacity to be alone. One of its first answers to this question is that it would mean claiming Winnicott's concepts for philosophy, that is, acknowledging them as generative for metapsychology rather than limited to considerations of technique. Stated most succinctly, Winnicott's key contribution to philosophy may be a new account of the fundamental distinction of the subject/object split, which tends to rob the theory and practice of psychoanalysis of its most substantial contributions.
The movement of the volume—its chapters are titled “Rationales,” “Findings,” “Series,” “Solitudes,” “Games,” “Spaces,” and “Properties”—suggests that working in between concepts (and even between concepts of the in-between) characterizes its method. Just as Heidegger is “on the way to language,” Abou-Rihan follows Winnicott “on the way to concepts.” Abou-Rihan admits that he is not naturally a “playful” writer, and in fact there is nothing glib, ironic, or flashy in the style that another author might claim as an attempt at Winnicottian play in the service of literary style. However, I take it that the movement between concepts and through two extended clinical vignettes is part of the way that Abou-Rihan plays, and he demonstrates as well as argues that the finding proper to playing theorizes psychoanalysis and characterizes the psychoanalytic more usefully than what is called thinking.
Reading Finding Winnicott demands a willingness to tolerate a particular form of frustration that may be constitutive of thinking in the West, namely, our inability to make use of (rather than fall prey to) pairs
and dualities. Seduced by binaries that maintain the separateness of opposing terms, we artificially limit thinking about modes of being and thinking that