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When one thinks of Winnicott, certain attributes come to mind: originality, spontaneity, playfulness, freedom, paradox, and vitality. Central to Winnicott's work is his concept of creativity, which he sees as fundamental to being human. For him, it is in the transitional space between the inner and outer world that creativity occurs. Winnicott believes that life without creativity is not worth living and is equivalent to psychic death. He is not talking here about the creativity of a genius like Andy Warhol or Philip Roth, but the creativity accessible to all of us - an aliveness and originality in our everyday life. Winnicott encourages us to leap off the beaten path. At his 1970 lecture to the Progressive League in London, Winnicott said that to draw like Picasso one has to be Picasso.
Winnicott loved poetry and playing with the imagination. He said that the poet in him “reaches to a whole truth in a flash” and carries with it enormous feelings. Winnicott found kindred spirits among the poets and artists of the Romantic period, especially Wordsworth and Keats. He felt an affinity with their appreciation of the authentic, spontaneous individual and the high value they placed on creativity and imagination. The Romantics privileged the inner life of feelings rather than formal rules imposed from outside (Goldman, 1993).
In both Wordsworth's and Keats' poetry we can hear poetic renderings of ideas that Winnicott was to develop in his psychoanalytic writing on infant development. Winnicott was intrigued by Wordsworth's use of the preverbal and the nonverbal, as in Wordworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality: “But for those first affections/Those shadowy recollections” (Wordsworth, 1966, p. 461).
Winnicott was inspired by Keats, whose poetry captures the uncertainties and doubts of the human experience while exploring the mysteries of the imagination.
The American transcendentalists strongly influenced Winnicott's ideas as well, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his