4. Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self

Now I shall discuss an important feature of playing. This is that in playing, and perhaps only in playing, the child or adult is free to be creative. This consideration arises in my mind as a development of the concept of transitional phenomena and it takes into account the difficult part of the theory of the transitional object, which is that a paradox is involved which needs to be accepted, tolerated, and not resolved.

A further detail of theory that has importance here is described as having to do with the location of playing, a theme I have developed in Chapters 3, 7, and 8. The important part of this concept is that whereas inner psychic reality has a kind of location in the mind or in the belly or in the head or somewhere within the bounds of the individual's personality, and whereas what is called external reality is located outside those bounds, playing and cultural experience can be given a location if one uses the concept of the potential space between the mother and the baby. In the development of various individuals, it has to be recognized that the third area of potential space between mother and baby is extremely valuable according to the experiences of the child or adult who is being considered. I have referred to these ideas again in Chapter 5, where I draw attention to the fact that a description of the emotional development of the individual cannot be made entirely in terms of the individual, but that in certain areas, and this is one of them, perhaps the main one, the behaviour of the environment is part of the individual's own personal development and must therefore be included. As a psychoanalyst I find that these ideas affect what I do as an analyst without, as I believe, altering my adherence to the important features of psychoanalysis that we teach our students and that provide a common factor in the teaching of psychoanalysis as we believe it to be derived from the work of Freud.