Playing & reality in psychodynamic practice

Playing and Reality was originally published over 50 years ago. It will need little, if any, introduction to most readers of the Journal. Aseminal collection of papers, written in Winnicott’s elegant style and idiomatic prose, it contains some of the most profound propositions concerning human nature, infant development and psychodynamic clinical practice that have been written. In the first paper that appears in the volume Transitional objects and Transitional phenomena Winnicott comments, ‘It is assumed that the task of reality acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience (c.f. Riviere, 1936), which is not challenged (arts, religion etc.). This intermediate area is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is “lost” in play’ (Winnicott, 2005, p. 18). He adds ‘This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work’ (2005:19). At a time when so much cultural experience is subject to humiliating and even punitive challenge, often in social media in one way or another, Winnicott’s words would seem to merit renewed consideration as a basis for an enlightened and humane engagement with the arts, religion and the sciences and their enjoyment.

On reading the contents of this issue of the Journal I was reminded of these words of Winnicott, of the interplay of Playing and Reality, and the resonances that they have in each of the contributions to the issue.

It is noteworthy and relevant to this issue of the Journal that Winnicott included creative scientific work as well as religion within the intermediate area of experience. For two of the articles in this issue are qualitative scientific studies and a third one addresses the relationship between psychodynamic practice and the Muslim religion.

The paradox that scientific work can creatively and playfully occupy an intermediate area of experience whilst at the same time addressing stark realities has recently been captured in the film Oppenheimer about the scientist who led the Manhattan Project which resulted in the first atomic bomb. In the New Mexico desert, a whole town Los Almos was built for a community of scientists who lived and worked and played together for 3 years, engaging in multiple scientific debates and creative enquiries. At the same time, the film captures the terrifying reality of the cruel and brutal action of dropping two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of the war that resulted in the horrifying deaths of tens of thousands of civilian men, women and children. The decision to drop the bombs involved, of course, the most profound ethical dilemma. The war in Ukraine has once again placed in the world on the precipice of a nuclear Armageddon.

At one point a question arises as to whether the atomic bomb will result in a firestorm that could ignite the atmosphere and result in the destruction of the planet. Oppenheimer replies that the chance of this happening is ‘near to zero’. But not quite zero. Ultimately, there would be an element of ‘faith’ or to use Winnicott’s phrase ‘belief in’ the proposition that the world would survive this first detonation. A similar question of ‘belief in’ the scientific paradigm surrounds the current reality of the climate emergency and the capacity of scientific endeavour and human ingenuity to successfully address the dangers to humanity posed by the vast and unsustainable current levels of CO2 emissions.

The first article in this issue of the Journal entitled ‘Reconstructing the internal parents in Virginia Wolf’s To the Lighthouse’ is written by the distinguished author Meg Harris Williams. Written from an essentially post-Kleinian perspective, the author invites the reader to consider the interplay between Virginia Wolf’s own life experience and the characters and narrative of her novel To the Lighthouse. This is done with both a depth of psychodynamic reflection and a lightness of touch which rewards the reader with new insights and understanding of this outstanding work of literature, whilst allowing the story itself to engagingly unfold. The symbolic meaning of the lighthouse, its beam and the journey towards it, in relation to the parental couple, their children and other characters in the novel weave their way through the article. The meaning of other metaphors such as the wrapping of the mother’s shawl around a pig’s skull are convincingly and succinctly elucidated. Meg Harris Williams is profoundly thoughtful about creativity, play and artistic inspiration, as well as the painful realities of living and dying. She provides many illustrations from the novel of the way in which the characters struggle with the strain of relating inner and outer reality and the ongoing developmental transformations that result from addressing this strain, as well as from the experience of creative artistic inspiration. She highlights the gender-defined roles of the parental figures and how the death of the mother coincides with father’s developing capacity to adopt a more fluid and less rigidly masculine position in his relationships with others. Meg Harris Williams conveys her own humanity in a way that is also at times almost poetic in style and could be said to parallel the notion of humanity that is captured in the concept of an intermediate area of experiencing. Her insightful reflections upon the characters in the novel and upon Virginia Wolf herself are inspiring and will encourage the reader to return to passages in the novel and reread them to gain further illumination that can be intrinsically enjoyed as well as having the potential to enhance their own clinical understanding and practice.

The second article in the main section of the Journal is written by Joanna Laurens and is entitled ‘I am watching you. Are you watching yourself in me: Reflection as an act of triangulation’. The author begins with the concept of reflection and notes that there are fundamentally two distinct meanings to its usage in psychodynamic conceptualisations. First, reflection can refer to the way in which the infant’s carer mirrors the aspects of the infant’s self so that the infant is able to recognise him or herself in the response of the carer. In outlining the concept of mirroring Joanna Laurens draws from and expands upon Winnicott’s seminal paper that appears in the volume Playing and Reality, entitled ‘The mirror role of mother and family in child development’ where the experience of being mirrored facilitates the infant’s ‘creative looking’. Second, reflection is also used in a different way in the notion of ‘reflective thought’. Here, Joanna Laurens provides an erudite description of the way in which the carer of the infant is also creative in receiving the projections of the infant and giving them back to the infant in a modified form, as Bion (1967) described, which in turn conveys a sense of difference to the baby. Moreover, drawing from attachment theory and the work of Peter Fonagy (2001), she highlights the way in which the reflective thought of the parent can convey a sense self-agency and intentionality back to the infant before the infant has begun to have a sense of this in their own mind. In this rich feast of conceptualisations, the author also develops the notion of triangulation in exploring the contribution of language to reflective thought from a Lacanian (Lacan, 1964) perspective. She illustrates all this complexity with several engaging and evocative case vignettes as well as illustrations from a Greek Myth, Eastern religions, Poetry and Philosophy. In this expansive panoramic view, it is noteworthy that there is also mention of the way in which the parent’s self-reflective function can almost be considered a form of scientific control whereby the parent is able to minimise the unintended influence of their own past traumatic experiences upon the baby.

The final paper in the main section of the Journal is a piece of qualitative scientific research. It is entitled ‘Being affected by the other’: Psychodynamic supervisors’ experiences of supervisory countertransference’ and is written by Marta Sant and Martin Milton. The nature of this creative piece of qualitative research results in a work that is readily accessible to the lay reader as well as other researchers, and will be of significant interest to psychodynamic practitioners, supervisors and supervisees. The methodology employed by the researchers is known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and it is one which Psychodynamic practitioners can experience as fundamentally compatible with the key principles that underly a psychodynamic approach. The researchers interviewed seven supervisors employing a method that is discursive in nature and in which they were required to maintain an ‘open-mindedness’ towards the participants and facilitate their exploration of their own supervisory countertransference. It was intended to capture the supervisors’ subjective experiences and the meanings that they attached to them. The authors begin with an overview of the concept of Countertransference and its widened application to the experiences and feelings of supervisors in the context of supervision. They include a discussion of the familiar concept of parallel process and how this can inform an understanding of some countertransference phenomena when employed judiciously. They then provide illuminating examples of the supervisors’ experience of difficult feelings and experiences that were evoked by their supervisees, and in so doing demonstrate the reality of the strain that supervisors frequently experience when reflecting upon the inner and outer realities of the supervisory relationship. The analysis of the findings of the research is eminently plausible and will enrich the understanding of both supervisors and supervisees of the supervisory process and can contribute to enhancing the effectiveness and sensitivity with which supervision is conducted. The article is a seminal example of the way in which creative scientific research has a valuable role to play in enhancing psychodynamic clinical practice including our understanding of unconscious processes in all their varied complexity.

In the Open Space section of the Journal there are two articles. The first is entitled ‘Suffering in silence; a Psychodynamic exploration into lived experience of opera singers in a time of Covid’, and is written by Alison Harvey. It is another piece of qualitative research that focuses upon a different painful reality, namely the experience of student opera singers during the Covid pandemic. It was of course a frightening and traumatic time for many people and the strain of relating unfamiliar internal and external realities was palpable for the human population across the world. Student opera singers are creatively engaged in using a part of their body, their voice, to generate musical spaces in which an audience can experience relief from the strain of relating internal and external reality. The scientific research which Alison Harvey conducted involved interviewing seven student opera singers, training in UK conservatoires, during the period of the pandemic. The research data from these interviews graphically demonstrate the particular nature of the impact that the pandemic had upon these students, who in the early part of the pandemic were unable to perform in front of other people, including their tutors and fellow students, because of the danger of infection and contagion that singing itself posed. The loss of their creative craft was, as Alison Harvey points out, catastrophic in nature and resulted in many opera singer students experiencing a sense of a disintegration of their self, acute vulnerability or internal conflict. The article includes short descriptions of individual responses to the trauma which convey an authenticity and plausibility that will be appreciated and recognised by student counsellors who supported Student opera singers during the pandemic. These accounts are seamlessly linked to psychodynamic conceptualisations such as Winnicott’s (1975) notion of disintegration as a defence against an unintegrated state arising from failures of ‘good enough’ care, Bion's (1967) notion of ‘nameless dread’ and Kohut and Goldberg’s (1984) view of fragmentation arising from a selfobject’s failure to perform functions needed to maintain a sense of self-cohesion. Alison Harvey’s creative research aims, as she herself points out, to increase an understanding of this group of students and to enhance the effectiveness with which they are supported. It is another remarkable piece of research which will be a rewarding read for a broad range of psychodynamic practitioners as well as those more specifically engaged in supporting opera students or students of performing arts more generally.

The second article in the Open Space section of the Journal is entitled ‘Ullman’s Experiential Dreamwork Group Approach versus Islamic Dream Interpretation: the dream of a psychologist woman’. It is written by Maria Campo-Redondo, Ali Azayez Alsheraifi & Mariam Awad Mehmas Alshamsi. The article describes the use of a Psychodynamic method of experiential dreamwork, originally devised by the American Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst Montague Ullman, on a course for Clinical Psychology graduate students in a Middle Eastern country. It is a fascinating account of a psychodynamic approach to working with dreams which is placed in juxtaposition with Islamic dream interpretation. It places the latter in an Islamic cultural context in which dreams have a long history of being a valued part of human experience and used as a source of guidance for actions in the living world on the part of the dreamer. At the centre of the article is an evocative illustration of a dream that is presented by a student psychologist in the experiential dream group. As well as demonstrating the method employed in the experiential group, the dream example and the dreamer’s own associations as well as the comments and associations of her fellow group members are convincingly linked to the experience of women in an essentially patriarchal society and show the struggles that women face in being able to assert and sustain their own autonomy. As Winnicott wrote in ‘Dreaming fantasising and living’ which is also included as a chapter in Playing and Reality, ‘Dream fits into object relating in the real world, and living in the real world fits into the dream-world in ways that are quite familiar, especially to psychoanalysts’ (2005:36). Maria Campo-Redondo and her co-authors expand upon this by explicitly identifying aspects of the social and cultural experience of Muslim women that emerge in the dreams that are reflected upon in the experiential group. Given the significance that has historically been attributed to dreams in the lives of women in Muslim cultures, the authors suggest tellingly that this form of experiential dream work group has the potential to engage with Muslim women and contribute significantly to the development of accessible mental health services in the Middle East. Moreover, in the dream illustration that appears in the article, the dreamer consults an Imam for an Islamic interpretation of the dream alongside of the insights that emerge in the dream group. As has been noted, Winnicott considered religion to be part of the intermediate area of experiencing, and in parallel with this, the authors invite the Western reader to be open-minded to the validity of the contribution of Islamic dream Interpretation and to approach this with a courteous respect. This is, in consequence, a ground-breaking article which contributes to bridging a gap between Western and Islamic cultures and therapeutic practice.

There is one Book Review Essay in this issue. It is written by Amrita Narayanan who works as Visiting professor at Ashoka University in India and is a psychoanalyst. It addresses the painful reality of Colonialism. The essay is entitled Decolonization Near and Far and the review is of a book by Sally Swartz entitled ‘Psychoanalysis and Colonialism: A Contemporary Introduction’. Amrita Narayanan’s reflective and erudite essay draws our attention to the way in which psychoanalysis has been imbued with a coloniality which has historically involved the imposition of western European imagination upon colonised countries including India and South Africa, amongst a much wider international community. Whilst acknowledging the noble and hopeful contribution that the new book by Sally Swartz makes to promoting an understanding of the effect of this colonising experience upon the practice of psychoanalysis in South Africa, she highlights some of the limitations of such a perspective. Notably, she makes the salutary point that a wider perspective would acknowledge the continued marginalisation and struggle to establish the validity of developments of psychoanalytic practice in colonised countries. This needs to be recognised by international psychoanalytic institutions. Moreover, she identifies the need for a coalition or community that can represent the experience and imaginative perspective of psychoanalytic practitioners living in decolonising countries to the wider psychoanalytic movement. Amrita Narayanan’s creative essay is a profound and enriching step along the way in the development of such a project.

In the Book Reviews section of the Journal there are six book reviews on subjects that ripple through the issue as a whole. The first book that is reviewed by Toby Ingham is written by Paul Terry, Consultant Editor of Psychodynamic Practice and is entitled ‘A Clinician’s guide to understanding and using Psychoanalysis in Practice’. Jennie Hogan reviews a book by Rosemary Rizq, a former Submissions editor of the Journal entitled ‘From fiction to Psychoanalysis: Re-imagining a relationship’. Martin Weegmann reviews ‘Theoretical and Clinical Perspectives on Narrative’ by Weisel-Barth. Robert Waska reviews a book by Huppertz entitled ‘Underlying assumptions in psychoanalytic Schools’. Aaron Davis reviews ‘The object relations lens: A psychodynamic framework for the beginning therapist’ by Miller and Alice Kentridge reviews ‘Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From feminism to Trans’ by Gherovici and Steinkojler.

It seems fitting to leave the final words of this editorial with Winnicott. ‘The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society, or the world, depends on experience which leads to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living’ (2005:139)

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Jonathan D. Smith

Jonathan Smith is book reviews Editor of Psychodynamic Practice.