ABSTRACT
Metaphorical, imaginary space/times for playing open up into the actual spaces of therapy, theatre, and other “acts apart”. In the glare of set-apart times and spaces, whatever happens, every detail, every word, may acquire a special, heightened significance. The secret of survival in these times and spaces lies in managing to sustain a tension between illusion and reality, without loss to either; but the patient for whom the seeming reality of the analytic experience eclipses its illusory, its token, aspect, may silently keep these things in his or her heart. Spaces, degrees of distance, determine the behaviour of words, of verbal language both in the perceived relationship between name and named and between self and other. In the minds of young children, words and meanings are fused together by an imagined identity or equivalence. The consensual, provisional nature of naming ensures that words are both arbitrary and flexible.
