ABSTRACT
The author describes imaginative elaboration as the internal activity of the individual, that which makes him alive. It permits him to grasp, perceive, and interpret both the internal and the external world in a creative, individual, and subjective way, i.e., a uniquely Winnicottian version of the concept of the self.
It is also a specific emotional and psychic activity of the analyst at work, an aspect of the countertransference, a psychic activity that adds meaning, but does not give meaning, because meaning is already there, though unexpressed. It is a transitional concept with a particular Winnicottian stamp, covering the psychic activity of both patient and analyst.
Hence, the importance of capacity for play: it is only in playing that the individual is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. Playfulness is threatened by modern reality, which impedes the “vague dialectic” that Winnicott sees between playing and reality. In play, reality is creatively transformed, rendered me/not me – as a transitional object, the “first not-me possession.”
The author describes the bodily, sensory way in which he reacts to information about two child patients whom he has yet to meet. Through various physical senses he is imaginatively elaborating the bare facts that he knows about them.
Imaginative elaboration is an individual/dual concept that connects, but at the same time maintains uniqueness. It is not a co-construction, but a meeting. The author posits it as a further step along the continuum of pre-representation and representation in Freudian metapsychology.
Imaginative elaboration is always born out of a clinical basis, born of the pulsating body of the analytic framework. In order to understand the patient, and possibly go on to interpret, one must first take in, participate, and support.
For the author, imaginative elaboration is all the psychic activity that is set in motion in order to fill the gap between the patient's need for his transference to be taken in first, and the analyst's attempt to take it in. It is this space into which imaginative elaboration penetrates – between body and mind, between the clinical and the theoretical. In other words, this is a sketchy form of countertransference before transference.
