ABSTRACT
This paper is one of Winnicott’s most important. It was published first in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1953 and later in Winnicott’s Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (1958). Like all those published in his later book Playing and Reality (1971), the paper focuses on the effect of the baby’s experiences with the mother and on its eventual capacity to separate from her successfully. This extract is concerned with how what Winnicott refers to as ‘the magic of imaginative and creative living’ comes about through the mother’s creative use of transitional phenomena or what he later called the transitional or potential space. These concepts are perhaps Winnicott’s most original and influential theoretical innovations. In the transitional space the child is enabled to make the delicate transition from its merged identity with the mother to one which is separate from her in the external world.
