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Donald Winnicott's gift for thinking in paradoxes, especially as embodied in his concept of transitional processes, dealt the Cartesian dualism its death blow. Neither subjective nor objective, transitional phenomena contain elements of both. The idea of transitional experiences overlapping subject and object, inner and outer, has been seminal in the work of the English object relations theorists. Following Winnicott, these thinkers have used the transitional idea to refine those interactional processes, developmental in nature, that evolve in the social matrix of mother and child, and then radiate out into play, creativity, and the entire domain of culture.
Since the transitional area transcends the outer world of objects and the inner subjective world, a psychological space is created, which Winnicott designated as “illusion,” a term he used synonymously with insight and creativity. It is the interplay of inner meaning and outer objects and actions that transforms illusion into cultural forms.
Winnicott provides the developmental guideposts on the way to a psychoanalytic theory of culture. The following essays flesh out the theory in religious and philosophical thought, poetry, the theater, and in psychoanalysis itself.
I want to thank all the contributors to this Special Issue for their enthusiastic support of this project and for our many informative and enjoyable discussions during the planning stage.