Conductor or Director? Transitional Space in Psychotherapy and in the Theater*

My thoughts in this area began soon after the publication of Playing and Reality (Winnicott, 1971), on a visit to the King's Head Theatre Club in Islington, London. My wife and I were taking my elderly mother to a performance of Mr. Joyce Is Leaving Paris, and we were seated for supper at a table that I felt she might find uncomfortably close to a bed on the stage. But I need not have worried because of the actors' skill in bringing the drama to life in the potential space between us. We may compare this with the more formal distance maintained by the proscenium-arch stage, where we look through the frame to the stage where the drama occurs. This traditional view of the theater confirms in a concrete way the original meaning of the word “theater” as a place where we look. Actors and authence are quite separate.

By contrast, consider a contemporary theater club where the action may take place in and among the tables. Where is the drama now? We look at the actors. They have to be even more careful to follow the normal dramatic convention of not looking at us. If we exchanged glances it would confirm our relationship as real people. They avoid this reality contact so that the play can come alive in the space between us.

I am already close to saying something about the potential space, or the transitional space in psychotherapy or play, on which Winnicott (1971) wrote so illuminatingly: “Play is neither a matter of inner psychic reality nor a matter of external reality … if play is