ABSTRACT
This chapter reads D. W. Winnicott’s ‘squiggle game’ as evidence that unearths the negative labor of witnessing that lies at the heart of the analytic situation, offering a glimpse into the processes by which unremembered events become psychologically significant. Two kinds of data are explored: the first is a set of drawings that Winnicott slipped into his notebook during World War II; the second is a published series of images created two decades later in a therapeutic consultation with a patient named Eliza. Both sets of evidence remind us of the impossibility of witnessing historical rupture, even as they also document ‘creative struggles’ to engage this impossibility through visual representation. It is argued that Winnicott’s wartime work set the stage for his later formulation of the squiggle game, and an analysis of this relation sheds light on the significance of the visual realm as a site of memory.
