Autobiography and Play: “A Conversation with My 12 Year Old Self”

Abstract

This article considers how auto/biography scholarship might read and understand the use of the archive of play by contemporary autobiographers. Drawing on the work of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, I examine how documents generated from play can be read as instances of self-life-writing, and demonstrate the interpretive approaches that we might use to consider texts which incorporate the archive of play in self-representation. Taking an autobiographical video posted to YouTube that “went viral” in December 2012 as an example, I argue that Winnicott's distinction between the content and the activity of play offers not only a way of understanding the role of playing in developing and understanding a sense of self but also a way of reading autobiographical texts that re-mediate materials produced through childhood play.

Keywords:

• autobiography
• archive
• play
• Winnicott
• YouTube
• youth

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Kate Douglas and Kylie Cardell for the invitation to participate in a stimulating and collegial event in Adelaide in July 2012. Thanks also to Amanda Kerley, who posted “A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self” to my Facebook wall, and Johannes Klabbers for early conversations on Winnicott and playing, and for being a first reader of this article.

Notes

1. Eldon's adolescent journals – notebooks in which he developed sophisticated collages involving original photographic prints, ephemera, and writing – were edited by his mother and published in a hardback full cover in 1997 under the title The Journey Is The Destination (see Eldon).

2. Winnicott viewed psychoanalysis itself as drawing on playing between the analysand and the analyst (50–51).

3. This differs from Caouette's approach, where he leaves what is being looked at when archival documents are shown open to interpretation, whether or not the child Jonathan is playing “himself” or someone else is an ambiguity that is central to Caouette's to the element of Tarnation's narrative that deals with his experience of dissociative disorder. Although both Caouette and McDonald present narratives of their identity as artists, McDonald's is far more direct in the connection it draws between playing and the True Self.

4. See Poletti, “Intimate Economies” for a discussion of materiality as authenticating strategy in Post Secret; and Poletti, Intimate Ephemera for an analysis of materiality in autobiographical practice in zine culture.

5. Winnicott uses the term “good-enough” mother to distinguish between the real woman and the figure of the mother in his developmental theory, but also to stress that “good” mothering will be in response to the development of a specific infant, rather “good” being an objectively defined quality (Abram 221).

6. For the adult McDonald, the success of the video is evidence of the success of YouTube as a space of experimentation and play: “When I was a kid, I was just playing. I don't know how far in advance I was thinking, and of course, I didn't think anyone would see it anyway. It was purely for my own enjoyment. I think maybe by the time I was 20 years old, I said, ‘This is something really cool.’ Even then, I didn't know how I was going to use it because, certainly, there was no YouTube at the time. When YouTube started, I knew that this would be something that was perfect for that. I did an early version. I consider YouTube as a playground, it's a place to experiment” (Strecker).

7. “Sorry,” the adult responds, distractedly, “I was just thinking out loud”.